Athletic Training

Sports injury surveillance is evolving to document overuse mechanism and non-time-loss (NTL) injuries, in addition to acute and time-loss (TL) injuries, to comprehensively describe injury and treatment burden for student-athletes and clinicians.

PURPOSE: To describe musculoskeletal acute and overuse injuries, stratified by TL and NTL, across one conference’s Division I athletic teams.

METHODS: This descriptive epidemiological study utilized de-identified electronic medical records from a conference for men’s and women’s cross country, golf, gymnastics, rowing, swimming/diving, tennis, track and field, water polo, men’s baseball, and women’s softball. Each sponsoring member institution provided injury occurrences from August 2018-March 2020, representing 300 team-seasons (134 men’s and 166 women’s). Musculoskeletal injury mechanism (acute or overuse) was identified and stratified by time-lost (TL or NTL). Injury frequencies, mean number of injuries per team per season and per player per season were calculated.

RESULTS: Of the 4621 injuries, most were acute (n = 2660, 57.6%) and in females (n = 1431, 53.8%). Overuse injuries (n = 1961, 42.4%) were more frequent in females (n = 1268, 64.7%). NTL represented 39.8% (n = 1840) of injuries, of which n = 1152 (62.6%) were in women. Mean injuries per team per season and per player per season varied by sport and gender (Table 1).

CONCLUSION: Nearly 64% of injuries were identified as acute-NTL, overuse-TL or overuse-NTL. Incorporating NTL and overuse mechanisms provides a more comprehensive picture of injury and treatment burden, especially for technical or “low-risk” sports.

This project was supported by the Pac-12 Conference’s Student-Athlete Health and Well-Being Initiative. The content of this abstract is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Pac-12 Conference, or its members.