Week 6
Prerna K -
Hey everyone! This week I am going to talk about a study done by Mayo Clinic (my site placement) about injury prevention, specifically within collegiate sports. The title of the study is “Epidemiology of collegiate injuries for 15 sports: summary and recommendations for injury prevention initiatives” by Hootman et al. The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association ) has a Injury Surveillance System (ISS), which has been utilized since 1982 to record data regarding injuries and exposure to injuries. Within what this study analyzed, around 182000 injuries were recorded and over one million exposures to injuries were recorded within a 16 year span.
Common trends that were found were that majority of the recordings were identified to be during games rather than practices. Luckily, more than half of the injuries were on a lower extremity, with ankle ligament sprains being the most common injury. Alongside this, “Rates of concussions and anterior cruciate ligament injuries increased significantly (average annual increases of 7.0% and 1.3%, respectively) over the sample period”(Hootman et al.) The sport with the most injuries was identified to be football in both practices and games. It was also found that within the male population of athletes, baseball had the least injuries during practices and women’s softball had the least amount of injuries during games.
Lastly, Hootman et al, claimed that “In conclusion, these data indicate that the risk and rate of injury in intercollegiate athletics are relatively low (1 injury every 2 games and 1 injury every 5 practices for a team of 50 participants) and that most reported injuries do not result in substantial time loss (ie, they are minor-severity to moderate-severity injuries). Most importantly, these data highlight potentially modifiable factors that, if addressed through injury prevention initiatives, may be able to reduce injury rates in collegiate sports even further”.
A way that this applied to my research was the difference between the amount of injuries and exposures within games and practices was addresses within my question of asking athletes of whether they returned to their sport in a full competition or conditioning phase. Full competition referred to playing/competing in all games and practices, while conditioning phase meant returning while sitting out of some practices or games.
Thank you!
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