Sports-related Injuries Among Adolescents: When Do They Occur, and How Can We Prevent Them?

Sports injuries, as causes of frequent morbidity but infrequent mortality among teens, receive less attention than do more dramatic motor vehicle accidents, homicides, and suicides. Injury to adolescents caused by both organized and informal athletics occurs commonly, yet the precise frequency, severity, and predisposing risk factors of such injuries have not been defined well. Unlike mortality data, which can be obtained readily from death certificates or through the National Center for Health Statistics, nonfatal sports injuries often go unrecognized among injury statistics because adolescents frequently do not seek health care or tell a coach or family member about the injury. Moreover, data on injuries can exist in a variety of places outside of physicians' offices, including emergency department or hospital records, school-based health centers, or trainers' logs. Different studies also have defined injury differently, with little standardization between studies and variances in sources used for data collection. Hospital or emergency department data may differ in the degree of severity of the injury from office-based data or data on those injuries treated solely by a coach or athletic trainer. Despite these difficulties, a plethora of data exists on the topic of sports injuries and their prevention.Common Causes of Sports InjuryIn a Massachusetts study by Gallagher and colleagues in the 1980s, sports injuries were found to be the most common cause of injury and, overall, the second leading cause of emergency department visits and hospital admissions in the 13- to 19- year-old age group.