Population-based study reveals higher concussion rates in females despite overall pandemic drops, highlighting the need for sex-specific injury surveillance.
Key Points
Investigate sex-specific annual case counts and incidence rates of concussions before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Retrospective population-based study using Ontario (ICES) administrative health data encompassing 393,397 individuals with concussions between April 2017 and March 2022.
Applied a 365-day washout period free of prior concussion or head injury diagnoses to identify incident cases.
Stratified case counts by sex, age groups, and rurality, comparing 2019 (pre-pandemic) with 2020 (pandemic) using Poisson regression.
Annual concussion counts fell sharply across all groups from over 99,000 cases per year pre-pandemic to 33,693 in 2020, with the largest drops in school-aged children and adolescents.
The overall proportion of concussions diagnosed in females increased modestly during the pandemic relative to males.
Poisson regression revealed that females had a 16.8% higher concussion rate than males after adjusting for age and rurality.