Teens who've had sports injury at risk for another

By Anne Harding

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - High school students with a history of a sports injury are almost twice as likely to be re-injured than their peers who haven't been hurt before, a new study shows.

The findings underscore the importance of helping young athletes get the care and rehabilitation they need after an injury, and making sure they don't return to play too early, Dr. Sarah B. Knowles of the Palo Alto Foundation Medical Research Institute in California told Reuters Health.

"You have issues like wanting to return to play, competition for starting positions, external and internal pressure to return to the support as soon as possible," she noted in an interview.

More than half of all high school students now participate in interscholastic athletics, Knowles and her team note in the American Journal of Epidemiology. To investigate risk factors for injuries, they analyzed data from 100 North Carolina public high schools for 12 sports over a 3-year period, during which time more than 2,500 out of 15,000 high-school varsity athletes were injured.

Athletes who suffered a past injury had an about double the risk of having a repeat injury compared with athletes who have never been injured, they found, with the part of the body injured in the past at greatest risk of being injured again. Boys were about one third more likely to be injured than girls, and football was the sport with the highest rate of injuries.

Knowles said she and her colleagues were "very surprised" by how common repeat injuries were. "These are pretty young kids," she said. "This isn't sort of an older population where they've had a lot of time to be injured."

The study shows how important it is for high schools to have a certified athletic trainer on hand to treat injuries immediately, work with athletes on rehabilitation, and follow-up with them later on, Knowles said. Less than half of U.S. high schools have a trainer on staff, she noted.

She and her colleagues conclude: "The influence of prior injury suggests that proper rehabilitation and primary prevention of the initial injury are important strategies for injury control."

SOURCE: American Journal of Epidemiology, September 29, 2006 online.