This week the National Football League Players Association announced a grant of $100 million to fund a study designed to diagnose, treat and prevent injuries in active and retired players. This work is expected to produce important knowledge that will also inform efforts to improve the safety of youth sports for boys and girls. Read more at Boston's NPR News Station...
The Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has established a committee to study sports-related concussions in youth, from elementary school through young adulthood, including military personnel and
their dependents. The committee will review the available literature on
concussions, in the context of developmental neurobiology, in terms of their
causes, relationships to hits to the head or body during sports, and the
effectiveness of protective devices and equipment. The committee will also
review concussion risk factors, screening and diagnosis, treatment and
management, and long-term consequences.
Learn more about the study at the Institute of Medicine website...
MAYWOOD, Il. - One way to avoid injuries in young athletes may be for them to simply spend more time in unorganized free play such as pick-up games, a Loyola University Medical Study has found.
In a first-of-its-kind study, sports medicine specialist Dr. Neeru Jayanthi and colleagues found that injured young athletes who play a single sport such as tennis spent much less time in free play and unorganized sports than uninjured athletes who play tennis and many other sports.
Jayanthi presented his findings at the Society for Tennis Medicine and Science and United States Tennis Association-Tennis Medicine and Injury Conference in Atlanta.
In this collaborative study, Jayanthi followed 891 young athletes who were seen at Loyola University Health System and Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago clinics. Participants included 618 athletes who sought treatment for sports injuries and 273 uninjured athletes who came in for sports physicals. Study participants included 124 tennis players (74 of whom played tennis exclusively).
Among single-sport tennis players, the ones who suffered injuries spent 12.6 hours per week playing organized tennis and only 2.4 hours per week in free play and recreation. By comparison, the uninjured tennis players spent only 9.7 hours per week playing organized sports, and 4.3 hours a week in free play and recreation, even while having a similar total number of weekly hours. In other words, the injured tennis players spent more than 5 times as much time playing organized tennis as they did in free play and recreation, while the uninjured players spent only 2.6 times as much time playing organized tennis as they did in free play and recreation.
Jayanthi found a similar ratio when he compared injured athletes who specialize in tennis with uninjured athletes who play all sports. The injured tennis players spent 5.3 times as much time playing organized tennis as they did in free play and recreation, while the uninjured athletes spent only 1.9 times as much time playing organized sports as they did in free play and recreation.
"Our findings suggest that more participation in a variety of unorganized sports and free play may be protective of injury, particularly among tennis players," Jayanthi said.
Jayanthi is director of Primary Care Sports Medicine, Tennis Medicine, and an associate professor in the departments of Family Medicine and Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. Co-investigators in his study are Stritch medical students Erin Feller, Daniel Fischer and Courtney Pinkham, and Dr. Cynthia LaBella and co-investigators at Children's Memorial Hospital.
The findings are a subset of an ongoing, prospective study of young athletes who are seen in clinics and followed for three years. The study has enrolled 891 athletes so far, and has received two grants from the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine.
The study began as a project in a Loyola program called STAR (Student Training in Approaches to Research). More than one-third of Stritch School of Medicine students participate in formal research programs such as STAR. Evidence demonstrates that such students become better physicians by understanding and practicing evidence-based medicine.
Contact: Jim Ritter
[email protected]
708-216-2445
Loyola University Health System
Ten youth leagues in six states are participating in USA Football's study of player health and safety. The nation's governing body for the sport on the youth level commissioned the study with Indianapolis-based Datalys Center for Sports Injury Research and Prevention in February. The independent scientific analysis will document player health and any sustained injuries during the 2012 season in the leagues of varying size and demographics in Arizona, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia.
The Datalys Center sends athletic trainers to practices and games to manage and document player health using the same methodology as it does for the NCAA and the National Athletic Trainers' Association.
In partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USA Football has educated more than 82,000 youth football coaches since 2007 to best teach the sport and manage player health, including suspected concussions.
"This ground-breaking research will enable us to strengthen youth football player safety in an evidence-based way," USA Football executive director Scott Hallenbeck said. "USA Football is committed to continue to lead America's football community and discover how our country's favorite sport can be made even safer and better."
Approximately 3 million children age 6-14 play organized youth tackle football.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/sports/article/10-leagues-part-of-USA-Football-study-3922897.php#ixzz29IWc3oy8
A new study published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics conducted telephone surveys with 1,718 New Hampshire and Vermont high school students and their parents as part of a 7-year longitudinal study of adolescent health. Participants were asked about the number of sports teams they participated on in the past 12 months, participation in physical education, and involvement in other forms of daily physical activity.
Participation on sports teams was found to be the only form of physical activity with an inverse relationship to both overweight/obesity and obesity, according to the study.
Adolescent female soccer players experience anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) knee injuries at a rate twice that of their male counterparts. This study looked at whether these serious injuries can be prevented.
A total of 4,600 females between the ages of 12 and 17 participated in the study. Two-thirds were instructed in how to perform a 15-minute warm-up program focusing on new control and core stability.
Seven players in the intervention group, and 14 in the control group experienced ACL injuries. The rate of ACL injury was 64 percent lower in the intervention group.
Read the full Chicago Tribune article here.
All serious athletes want to be more competitive in their chosen sports, and for many, that includes controlling their body weight. That can be a healthy thing, up to a point. Too often, however, young female athletes try to shed too many pounds and fall victim to a trio of health disorders commonly known as the female athlete triad.
The three parts of the female athlete triad are disordered eating, osteoporosis and amenorrhea, or cessation of menstruation.
Through May 15 of this year, the IHSA has reviewed 145 reports that have come into their office from sports officials who have had to remove a student-athlete from a game. Of those 145 cases, 118 players did not return to the game in which they sustained the injury.
Tragedy can strike if a concussion is not treated properly, causing further brain trauma, chronic headaches, psychological disorders, long-term memory loss, Alzheimer’s disease and even death. Cumulative injury can cause serious mental impairment later in life even if immediate problems aren’t evident.
Even with all these potential long-term effects, and media coverage being hyped recently, not enough people are actually aware of how serious the consequences are.
A heart characteristic linked to sudden cardiac death is more common in athletes than non-athletes, and black male athletes are much more likely to have this characteristic than other athletes, a new study finds.
The characteristic -- left-ventricular hyper-trabeculation (LVHT) -- is a feature of certain types of cardiomyopathy (chronic disease of the heart muscle). The abnormality is the leading cause of exercise-related sudden cardiac death in athletes.
Read the full U.S. News Health article here.