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 While other sports like basketball, baseball and softball accounted
for more injuries overall, air gun injuries are completely
preventable, said lead study author Dr. Sterling Haring, a public
health researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
“Wearing appropriate protective eyewear (not just sunglasses) can
mean the difference between great vision and near-blindness, and it
couldn’t be more appropriate than in air gun sports,” Haring said by
email.
“Most of these sports, such as basketball and baseball, involve only
incidental contact with other players; with air guns, however, the
entire point is to shoot a small projectile at another player,”
Haring added. “Some of these projectiles are bound to hit someone in
the eye, and when they do, it could be disastrous.”
Sports-related eye injuries send an estimated 30,000 people to
emergency departments in the U.S. each year, researchers report in
JAMA Ophthalmology.
In addition to vision problems, these injuries can also have a
lasting impact on quality of life and increase the odds of
additional injuries, depression and chronic illness, researchers
note.
To assess the risk associated with different sports, researchers
examined data on more than 120,000 sports-related eye injuries
treated in U.S. emergency departments nationwide from 2010 to 2013.
In more than 70 percent of these cases, eye injuries were the
primary diagnosis.
Injured people were 22 years old on average, and 60 percent of cases
involved people who were 18 years old or younger.
Roughly four in five injured patients were male.
Most often, injuries happened as a result of playing basketball; the
sport accounted for 23 percent of the cases in the study. The next
most common source of injuries was baseball and softball, accounting
for 14 percent, and air guns, responsible for 12 percent.
Although most sports-related eye injuries were superficial, more
than one-fifth of baseball-related injuries were fractures of the
bones surrounding the eye.
Just 3.1 percent of the cases with a diagnosis of ocular trauma
involved vision impairment.
The sports most likely to result in injuries with vision impairment
were paintball and air gun activities, racket sports and soccer, the
study found. The odds of vision problems increased with age.
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Paintball, for example, was almost five times more likely to result
in vision problems than football. Air guns were almost four times as
likely to lead to vision problems.
Compared to football, hockey and soccer were more than twice as
likely to result in vision impairment, the study also found.
One limitation of the study is that it didn’t include people treated
for eye injuries outside the emergency room, the authors note.
Researchers also lacked data on long-term outcomes after the
injuries.
“While hospital records are a valid source, it represents only the
tip of the iceberg,” said Dr. Swarup Mukherjee, a researcher at
Nanyang Technological University in Singapore who wasn’t involved in
the study.
“The actual eye injury incidence in sports may be much bigger than
reported,” Mukherjee added by email. “Moreover, there is minimal
data from populations outside the USA.”
Even though the vast majority of eye injuries can be prevented with
the use of protective eye wear, most young athletes in particular
don’t use protection even in high risk sports, Mukherjee noted.
“It is important to know that using ‘street wear’ rather than
certified protective eyewear actually increases the risk and
severity potential of an eye injury compared to not wearing any
eyewear protection,” Mukherjee said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2fjqCcs JAMA Ophthalmology, online November 3,
2016.
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