The reproducibility of physical therapy/physiotherapy rehabilitation interventions described in published studies on the clinical management of acute onset and long-standing groin pain: a protocol for a scoping review v1

Groin injury/pain is a prevalent problem experienced by athletes participating in multidirectional sports. Injury surveillance studies have reported that the seasonal prevalence of groin pain is 4-19% in senior men’s football and 2-14% in senior women’s football (Walden et al., 2015). The season prevalence of groin injury/pain is similar in other field-based sports that involve a change of direction, sudden acceleration, deceleration and maximal sprinting, such as Australian rules football (Orchard et al., 1998), Gaelic football (Carolan et al., 2022) and rugby league (O’Connor, 2004). Athletes who experience groin injury/pain often have co-existing symptomatic pathology, making clinical diagnosis and management/treatment planning challenging (Falvey et al., 2016). Rehabilitation interventions with varied focuses have been shown to be effective in returning athletes with (acute and long-standing) groin injury/pain to their pre-injury sporting levels (Hölmich et al., 1999; King et al., 2015; Serner et al., 2020). The transparent reporting of clinical rehabilitation interventions is of interest to clinicians, as this enables them to implement the interventions described in the published literature in their own day-to-day clinical practice. In the absence of a complete description of interventions, clinicians cannot implement evidence-informed rehabilitation interventions. A lack of transparent reporting also constrains the ability of researchers to replicate and expand upon the results of published studies. To date, no research has explored the reproducibility of published rehabilitation interventions for athletes with acute or long-standing groin injury.