|
 Researchers examined data on high school soccer players from 2005 to
2014 and found non-concussion injury rates declined for boys and
were little changed for girls. But concussions increased in both
male and female players.
The significant rise in concussion rates “could be mainly due to a
better recognition of concussion by medical and coaching staff,”
study leader Dr. Morteza Khodaee, a sports medicine researcher at
the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said in an email.
The research team looked at injuries per minute of athletic exposure
(AE), which includes both practices and competitions, for U.S. high
school athletes.
Overall, there were 6,154 injuries during 2.98 million athletic
exposures, for an injury rate of 2.06 per 1,000 AEs, the study
found.
That included about 1.8 million soccer injuries among girls and 1.5
million among boys.
Girls were 27 percent more likely to sustain soccer injuries than
boys, the study found.
Injuries were 42 percent more common in competitions than during
practice.
“The majority of injuries during competitions occurred during the
second half indicating a potential accumulated effect of fatigue,”
the authors reported.
“It is well known that the risk of injury is higher in competition
compared with practice,” Khodaee said. “This is most likely due to
more intense, full contact and potentially riskier play that occurs
in competition.”
Still, while injury rates were significantly higher in competition,
more than one third of all injuries occurred in practice.
About 43 percent of injuries overall happened when athletes collided
with another player.
Midfielders sustained the most injuries, accounting for 38 percent
of cases for boys and 37 percent among girls.
The most common diagnoses were ligament sprains, accounting for
about 30 percent of injuries.
Concussions accounted for about 18 percent of injuries, followed by
muscle strains at 16 percent.
Injuries that forced players to stop participating most often
involved ligament sprains and fractures, but concussions made up
almost 11 percent of these cases.
[to top of second column] |
Overall, the concussion rate during the study period was about 0.36
per 1,000 AEs. Among girls, it rose from about 0.4 per 1,000 AEs at
the start of the study to about 0.6 per 1,000 AEs at the end. For
boys, the rate rose from about 0.2 to 0.45 per 1,000 AEs over the
course of the study.
Concussions accounted for about 17 percent of injuries among boys
and 19 percent of injuries among girls.
In about 21 percent of concussion cases, symptoms resolved within
one day. But recovery took more than one week in 29 percent of
concussions.
Most concussions required athletes to miss between one and three
weeks of soccer. Athletes were medically disqualified for an entire
season in 3.5 percent of concussion cases, the study found.
One limitation of the study is that not all schools in the U.S.
contributed data for analysis, the authors note. Only injuries
reported to an athletic trainer were included.
Researchers also lacked data on how many minutes individual players
participated in sport, requiring them to instead calculate injury
rates based on the total minutes of play for teams. This means
injury rates in the study don’t necessary reflect how much time
athletes spend on the field.
“This was only an epidemiologic study to calculate the risk of
injuries and (find) any differences in sex, position of players, and
mechanism of injuries,” Khodaee said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2jCul6V British Journal of Sports Medicine,
online December 28, 2016.
[© 2017 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2017 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
