Acute and overuse injuries among sports club members and non-members: the Finnish Health Promoting Sports Club (FHPSC) study

摘要

BackgroundPhysical activity in adolescence provides multidimensional health benefits [1, 2]. However, the risk of sports injuries increases along with the increasing volume, intensity, and competitiveness of the sports activities [3]. Youth team sports carry a higher injury risk than individual sports [4]. Some earlier studies have focused only on acute [5] or overuse injuries [6] only on either sex [7, 8] or on a specific injury, such as anterior cruciate ligament rupture [9, 10]. There are scattered studies on adolescents covering various different sports and different types of injuries. The occurrence and risk factors of different types of unintentional injuries among Finnish adolescents have previously been studied [11]. The sports injuries of adolescent sports club members have been studied previously [12,13,14], but studies comparing injuries between sports club members and non-members are rare [13]. Furthermore, the occurrence of overuse injuries has been studied less than that of acute injuries. The American Medical Society for Sports Medicine has made a position statement concerning overuse injuries and burnout, which are common problems in youth sports [15].Sports clubs are a common way to participate in organized sports in Finland. Nearly half of the adolescent population reported to participate in organized sports in year 2013 [16] and according to the newest report this has raised to as much as 62% [17]. This cross-sectional study is a part of the Finnish Health Promoting Sports Club (FHPSC) study [18]. The purpose of this report is to compare the occurrence of self-reported acute and overuse injuries in Finnish adolescent sports club members and non-members. We also compared the anatomic locations of acute and overuse injuries and the injury types and studied the association between training and competing habits with the risk of injury. The injury definitions used in the questionnaire were obtained from an earlier Finnish study [19]. An acute injury was defined as an injury occurring suddenly keeping one away from exercise for at least one day or requiring a physician’s care [20, 21]. An overuse injury was defined as an injury that causes gradually increasing pain during exercise loading without any noticeable external cause possibly stopping exercise completely [20, 22].