A new study suggests men should be careful if playing football and wrestling, and for women it's soccer and gymnastics.
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Football, especially, was the leading cause of the more than one million injuries suffered by college athletes in the United States between 2009 and 2014, according to researchers. They also found that more athletes suffered injuries during practices than during competition.
"Men's football accounts for the most college sport injuries each year, as well as the largest proportion of injuries requiring 7 or more days before return to full participation, or requiring surgery or emergency transport," wrote a team led by Dr. Alejandro Azofeifa, of the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
The researchers looked at data on injuries suffered by NCAA athletes in 25 sports between the 2009-2010 and 2013-2014 school years. They tabulated 1,053,370 injuries over the five years of the study, for an average of 210,674 injuries per year.
Football accounted for the most injuries, at more than 47,000 per year. The sport also had the highest rate of injuries during competition, at just under 40 per 1,000 times an athlete engaged in the sport ("athlete-exposures").
However, when the researchers added in the relatively low rate of practice-linked injuries, the overall injury rate fell to 9.2 per every 1,000 athlete-exposures.
That means that men's wrestling actually poses the highest risk for injury for male college athletes, with an overall rate of just over 13 injuries per 1,000 exposures.
Among women's sports, gymnastics had the highest overall injury rate (10.4 per 1,000), as well as practice injury rate (10 per 1,000), while soccer had the highest injury rate during competitions (slightly more than 17 per 1,000).
Concussion tops the list of injuries sustained by high school cheerleaders as the once-tame sideline activity becomes more daring and competitive, a new U.S. study finds.
But cheerleading still ranks near the bottom of high school sports in terms of overall injury rate, according to a research.
"Anecdotally, it's pretty clear to most people over the past few decades that cheerleading has shifted from a sideline activity to a competitive sport itself. This may have resulted in an increase in injury," said study author Dustin Currie, a doctoral student in epidemiology at Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
"We only have five years of data but I don't know whether to say it's better for cheerleading to not become a more competitive sport," he added.
"If it's getting more children to participate in athletics, it's probably a net positive."
About 400,000 students in the United States participate in high school cheerleading each year, including more than 123,000 involved in competitive "spirit squads" that incorporate stunts, pyramids, tosses and jumps, according to the U.S. National Federation of State High School Associations.
But states classify cheerleading in various ways, with some defining it as a sport and others lumping it with other nonathletic extracurricular activities, Currie said. The distinction is important because defining it as a sport requires stricter rules regarding practice location and other safety measures, as well as coaching certification requirements, he said. ■