570 MEP150 – Efficacy of an injury prevention programme to reduce injury complaints leading to participation restriction in athletics: a cluster-randomised controlled trial

AbstractObjective To analyse the efficacy of the Athletics Injury Prevention Programme (AIPP) to reduce the percentage of athletes presenting at least one participation restriction injury complaint (ICPR) over an athletics season.Design Cohort study with 39-weeks follow-up.Setting PREVATHLE randomized controlled trial (ClinicalTrials. gov Identifier: NCT03307434).Participants 840 female and male competitive athletics athletes.Intervention Unsupervised exercise-based injury prevention programme to be performed 2/week.Main Outcomes Measures ICPR, training and competition exposures, and, compliance with the AIPP for the intervention group. The primary outcome was the percentage of athletes presenting at least one PRIC over the study follow-up.Results We included 449 athletes in the intervention group and 391 athletes in the control groups. From them, 68 (15.1%) and 100 (25.6%) athletes, respectively, provided 100% of the requested information during the follow-up (39 weeks). Six (8.8%) performed the AIPP 2/week or more, as requested and thus were complaint. There were no difference in the proportion of athletes who had at least one ICPR over the follow-up period between the intervention (64.7%) and control groups (65.0%) (adjusted odds ratios= 0.81 (95% CI 0.36 to 1.85)). There were no between-group differences when comparing separately the subgroups corresponding with the different compliance levels.Conclusion We did not report any efficacy of the AIPP to reduce prevalence of injury complaints in this cluster randomised controlled trial. The overall response proportion and the compliance with the AIPP in the intervention group were low, that can play a role in the results. Efforts should thus be first made to improve the implementation and adoption of interventions.