Injury common among young female soccer players in Denmark
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Recently published data showed a high incidence of injury in female adolescent soccer players in Denmark.
Researchers studied 424 injuries in 498 female soccer players between 15 and 18 years of age included in the Danish Football Association between February and June 2012. Injuries and exposure were self-reported weekly via weekly text message questionnaires and individual interviews. Injury and relative risk rates were calculated via Poisson regression.
Incidence of injury, time-loss injuries and severe injuries were 15.3, 9.7 and 1.1, respectively, per 1,000 hours of soccer exposure. Players with under an hour per week of exposure were three to 10 times more likely to sustain time-loss injuries than those with higher weekly average exposures, according to the researchers. This trend also applied to overall injury rates, as players with higher average exposure in injury-free weeks were significantly linked with lower risk of injury.
Most severe injuries that occurred were to the knee, ankle, groin and lumbar spine. Level of competition was not associated with the risk of time-loss injury, according to the researchers.
Disclosure: Financial support for this study was provided by Nordea-fonden, Denmark.