Ahead of the CAF African Under 17 Championship finals starting in Algeria on Thursday, the selected players for the two-week biennial event are set to undergo a medical check-up that will be spearheaded by a group of international experts under the leadership of the FIFA Chief Medical Officer and the Head of Research of the FIFA Medical Assessment and Research Centre together with national team physicians.

Dubbed as a 'new approach to performing pre-competition medical assessments', the tests are necessitated by the fact that intense exercise can trigger Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD) in players with underlying heart disease, and the main objective of the assessment is to determine whether a footballer is at increased risk of Sudden Cardiac Death. The feasibility of a football-specific pre-competition medical assessment was first tested at the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

However, as the examinations back then were carried out individually by the qualified teams using a standard F-MARC questionnaire, the results were of differing quality standards.

In order to ensure the quality of the assessment and make it as effective and efficient as possible, F-MARC will now seek to undertake the examinations in cooperation with the national team physicians in the four days prior to the African U-17 Championship in Algeria -  which is fixed between March 19 and April 2, 2009.

All 160 players from the eight participating teams (Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gambia, Guinea, Malawi, Niger and Zimbabwe), will undergo the assessment which includes a general physical examination of the heart, lungs, spine, ankles, knees, and hips, as well as blood analysis and a comprehensive cardiac examination.