New study finds 2.5 million basketball injuries to high school athletes in 6 seasons

Basketball is a prominent secondary school sporting activity in the USA with 1 million participants every year. A recently published research study by scientists in the Center for Injury Study and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Medical facility is the first to contrast and also define the incident as well as circulation patterns of basketball-related injuries treated in emergency situation divisions as well as the high school sports training setup among teens and also teens.

The study, published online in the Journal of Athletic Training, examined data relating to adolescents 13-19 years of age who were treated in U.S. emergency departments (EDs) from 2005 to 2010 and those treated in the high school athletic training setting during the 2005–2006 through the 2010–2011 academic years for an injury associated with basketball. Nationally, 1,514,957 patients with basketball-related injuries were treated in EDs and 1,064,551 were treated in the athletic training setting.

The research discovered that generally, injuries that are a lot more quickly detected and dealt with, such as sprains/strains, were most likely to be dealt with onsite by a sports fitness instructor while a lot more severe injuries, such as fractures, that need extra considerable analysis and treatment procedures were much more typically treated in an ED.

“Athletic trainers play a really important role in helping to assess those more mild or moderate injuries and that helps alleviate a burden on the health care system and on families,” said Lara McKenzie, PhD, the study’s lead author and principal investigator in the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s. “They are right there on the sidelines. They are there when some of these things happen. And they can be a great resource for families to evaluate that injury immediately.”

In 1998, the American Medical Association suggested all high school sports programs employ a sports medication device containing a medical professional supervisor as well as an athletic fitness instructor, yet as of 2009, the National Athletic Trainers’ Association approximated just 42 percent of secondary school sports groups met this recommendation. With over half of U.S. secondary school athletes not having access to an athletic fitness instructor during method or competition, a huge majority of hurt players wind up in urgent treatment centers and emergency situation departments, some needlessly.

Dr. McKenzie, also a faculty member at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, said that while athletic trainers cannot treat every injury, they can make the system more efficient by only sending athletes to the hospital when it is necessary and helping athletes return to play when it is safe.

“We are there to prevent injuries, evaluate them quickly, treat them immediately and try our best to make sure that as we return them to play we do it in the most safe and efficient way possible,” said Kerry Waple, ATC, certified athletic trainer in Sports Medicine at Nationwide Children’s. “There are a lot of injuries that happen that are winding up in urgent cares and emergency departments that don’t need to be there.”

Of the types of injuries that happen in basketball, the foot is commonly affected. Strains and sprains are reported in multiple other studies are the most commonly seen.

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