750 EP048 – Exploring elite athletics’ perceptions and beliefs regarding sports injury prediction as a strategy for injury risk mitigation

Background Elite athletics stakeholders (athletes, coaches, health professionals) must contend with injuries. Injury risk reduction measures can mitigate and reduce the injury risk in athletics. The development of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques may enable measuring an individual athlete's own risk of injury occurrence and can also be used to further investigate the relative importance of risk factors related to sports injuries. In the near future, elite stakeholders could have the opportunity to access the injury risk provided by prognostic algorithms in order to manage training and injury risk as an additional injury risk reduction measure. Objectives To explore the perception and beliefs of elite athletics (track and field) athletes, coaches, and health professionals, towards the use of injury prediction as an injury risk reduction measure. Design Cross-sectional study Setting The 2022 European championships in Munich (Germany) Participants Elite athletic stakeholders (n=2410) including athletes (n=1540), coaches (n=705) and health professionals (n=165) from 52 countries registered at the 2022 European Athletics Championships. Main outcomes measurements An online questionnaire to assess the level of agreement using a sliding scale (0–100) to, i) the degree of interest in the sports injury prediction, ii) the intent to use, iii) the help in the field induced by this approach, iv) the stress related by such information, and v) the dissemination. Results There were 54 answers from 20 athletes, 12 coaches, and 22 health professionals, from 17 countries. Elite athletics stakeholders expressed a high level of agreement regarding the interest (85±16), intent to use (84±16), and perceived help (85±15). Regarding potential stress induced by injury prediction, the level of agreement was moderate (41±33) with an important inter-individual variability in each elite athletic stakeholder. Conclusions Regardless of the stakeholders, there was a high level of acceptance reported in this potential measure.