By IANS,
Washington : Boys tend to face three times greater risk of shoulder injuries, especially when they are competing in high school athletics.
Although such injuries account for just eight percent of all injuries sustained by high school athletes, shoulder injuries were relatively common in predominately male sports such as baseball (18 percent of all injuries), wrestling (18 percent) and football (12 percent).
Moreover, boys experienced higher shoulder injury rates than girls, particularly in soccer and baseball/softball.
Player-to-player contact was associated with nearly 60 percent of high school athletes’ shoulder injuries from 2005 through 2007.
The study, conducted by Centre for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, is the first to examine shoulder injuries across sports in a nationally representative sample of US high school athletes.
“Shoulder injuries were far more likely to occur in football and wrestling than in any other sport,” explained the study’s author Ellen Yard, Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. “Shoulder injuries were also three times more likely to occur in competition compared to practice.”
The most common shoulder injuries included sprains and strains (37 percent), dislocations and separations (24 percent), contusions (12 percent) and fractures (seven percent), according to a Nationwide release.
Sports studied included football, boys’ and girls’ soccer, volleyball, boys’ and girls’ basketball, wrestling, and baseball and softball. Data for the study were collected from the 2005-2007 National High School Sports Injury Surveillance Study (High School RIO™) and were funded in part by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
The study was published online in an issue of the Journal of Athletic Training.