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By Alan Mozes
NEW YORK, Mar 06 (Reuters Health) - Each year, 2.6 million young Americans visit emergency departments for sports-related injuries, costing as much as $500 million to treat, government researchers said Monday.
Considering this, it might be worth using the emergency department as a venue for counseling people about injury prevention, the study authors suggest.
"The good news is that children, adolescents and young adults are participating in sporting activities--the bad news is that many of these injuries could be prevented by proper training and use of safety gear," according to Catharine W. Burt, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"At a time when there is an increase in obesity in children and adolescents, it is important to encourage youth to participate in physical activities like sports and recreation," she said in an interview with Reuters Health.
"But it is then important to provide the safety instruction to both the coaches and players, and the safety gear that is needed to prevent or reduce the severity of injuries," she added.
Burt and colleague Mary D. Overpeck analyzed descriptions of injuries and their reported causes at the time a patient sought care at an emergency department between 1997 and 1998, as part of the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. The researchers focused on a sample of almost 15,000 cases where information about what a person was doing when they were injured was available. Their findings are published in the March issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine.
Sport-related injuries constituted one in five visits to the emergency department among people aged 5 to 24, the investigators found. Males in this age range were twice as likely as females to make a sports injury-related trip to the emergency department.
Basketball and biking were the most frequent causes of injury for this group, the report indicates. Burt and Overpeck estimate that basketball caused nearly 6 emergency department visits annually for every 1,000 people aged 5 to 24, and that a similar number were linked to bicycling or dirt biking.
SOURCE: Annals of Emergency Medicine 2001;37:301-308.
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