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Study sheds new light on severe injury rates for high school athletes
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A recent study on high school athletes indentifies the rate of severe injuries by sport, gender and injury area, and underscores the need for injury prevention.
“Other studies have shown injury rates by sport; however; very few studies have highlighted the severity of injuries per sport,” Dawn Comstock, PhD, a study author and assistant professor at the Center for Injury Research and Policy at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, said in an American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM) press release.
The study appears in the September issue of the American Journal of Sports Medicine.
Comstock and her colleagues collected injury data from 100 nationally representative U.S. high schools between 2005 and 2007. Schools included in the study had a National Athletic Trainers Association-affiliated certified athletic trainer report and routinely entered data into the High School Reporting Information Online injury surveillance system, according to the release.
The investigators collected data on boys’ wrestling, football and baseball and girls’ volleyball and softball injuries. They also examined data for both boys and girls basketball and soccer.
The investigators defined severe injury as any injury that caused an athlete to miss more than 21 days of sports participation.
Comstock and her colleagues reported that 14.9% of all injuries were severe injuries.
“Our research illustrated severe injuries occurring most frequently in football. In addition, girls seemed to suffer more severe injuries playing basketball than boys,” she said in the press release.
After football, they found the highest rates of severe injuries occurred in wrestling for boys and in basketball and soccer for girls. They also discovered that girls had a higher rate of severe injuries than boys among comparable sports such as baseball/softball, soccer and basketball.
An analysis of the injury sites revealed that most severe injuries occurred in the knee, ankle and shoulder, according to the press release.
Comstock said creating ways to lower the rate and severity of sports-related injuries is crucial.
“Preventing these types of severe injuries is especially important to minimize health care costs both on the family and on the health care system itself,” Comstock said in the release. “Future studies should focus on risk factors and developing prevention interventions.”
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