WAUKESHA, Wis. - GE Healthcare, a division of the General Electric Company (NYSE: GE), and the Olympic Committees from the U.S., Italy and China, have collaborated on a new clinical study to examine athletes’ hearts in an effort to gain new insights into techniques for diagnosing and treating heart disease. Initial findings will be announced at a press conference with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), current Olympic athletes, and representatives of the Torino 2006 Olympic Winter Games medical corps in Torino on February 19th.

“This study is the first-of-its-kind to investigate the cardiovascular effects of rest and activity of both short- and long-distance athletes who follow fundamentally different training regimes,” explained research leader Malissa Wood, MD at Massachusetts General Hospital and researcher at Harvard Medical School. “Past research has shown that abnormalities can develop in endurance athletes’ hearts after exercise. Such changes like stiffening of the heart are similar to changes found in the earliest phases of coronary heart disease. We hope that the findings of this study will allow physicians to use new methods to more precisely diagnose and follow the treatment of heart disease and heart failure in everyone from Olympic athletes to the patients we see every day.”

The cardiovascular study is an initiative of GE Healthcare as part of GE’s TOP sponsorship of the Olympic Games through 2012. GE Healthcare is providing the world’s most advanced miniaturized ultrasound systems at the Torino Games. These systems - the Vivid i for cardiovascular assessment and the LOGIQ Book used primarily for musculoskeletal screening - are providing sports medicine professionals with a means to track overall cardiac and musculoskeletal fitness of an athlete over the course of their training regimen and also to ensure advanced healthcare to the athletes at the Torino 2006 Olympic Winter Games.

Ed Ryan, Director of Sports Medicine, United States Olympic Committee, said, “The ability to learn more about heart capacity through the cardiovascular research will be a huge advantage to U.S. Olympians and hopefuls in their training and competition.”

“As athletes, we are constantly trying to learn more about our bodies, so we can push ourselves to get the most out of training and competition. Being part of a sports science program like this one, which is on the cutting edge of heart research, is an amazing opportunity,” added Apolo Anton Ohno, U.S. Olympic short track gold medalist and current world champion.

Currently, many professional sport organizations and Olympic teams undergo regular cardiovascular screenings to understand their cardiovascular health and assess risk factors for sudden cardiac death. GE Healthcare supplies portable cardiovascular technology for the sports medicine industry around the world, including professional soccer teams in Spain, Norway and Germany and public sporting events such as the Boston Marathon to make cardiovascular health screening quick, easy and readily available anywhere where athletes may be and to provide valuable information about the athlete’s overall health prior to any physical exertion activity.

“GE’s innovation in imaging and miniaturization is allowing ultrasound to play an increasingly important role in the early detection and diagnosis of many prevalent health issues including heart disease which is responsible for one death out of three worldwide,” concluded Dr. Bill Clarke, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology & Medical Officer, GE Healthcare. “We are particularly excited about our collaboration with leading medical experts and the Olympic movement to further develop cardiac patient care for everyone.”

About GE and the Olympic Games

As a Worldwide Partner of the Olympic Games, GE is the exclusive provider of a wide range of innovative products and services that are integral to a successful Games. From providing power, lighting, security and modular space solutions at Olympic venues to supplying ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment to help doctors treat athletes, GE works closely with the Organizing Committees, local municipalities and other Olympic Partners to understand their needs and deliver solutions that only GE can. NBC Universal, a division of GE, is the exclusive U.S. media partner of the Olympic Games. The GE and NBC Universal partnerships extend through 2012.

About GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping physicians around the world develop new ways to predict, diagnose, inform and treat disease, so their patients can live their lives to the fullest.

GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases, and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention.

Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $15 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 43,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at  www.gehealthcare.com