When I was younger, the prevailing parenting advice regarding athletics and children was to identify a sport your child would enjoy early on and have them focus on it throughout adolescent so she would have a competitive edge. Which is how I ended up playing on a boys soccer team at the age of five — there were no all-girls soccer teams in Austin, Texas in 1983. Soccer continued to be my sole sport throughout high school and college. Eventually, I had to give it up because the constant ankle injuries I endured meant I spent more time in rehab mode than training mode.
Never once did a physician or a trainer suspect that the injuries were related to overuse, despite the long hours I logged on running paths, in the weight room and on the field. So I was interested to read about recent research showing that girls are at a much higher risk than boys when it comes to overuse injuries in high-school sports.
In the study, researchers at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center reviewed 3,000 male and female injury cases over a seven year period across 20 high-school sports including soccer, volleyball, gymnastics and lacrosse. According to a release:
[Researchers] found the highest rate of overuse injuries occurred in girls track (3.82), followed by girls field hockey (2.93) and girls lacrosse (2.73). Overuse injuries in boys were most found in swimming and diving (1.3).
"These young people spend more time playing sports both in competition and in practice. So, there's a correlation there between the amount of time that they're playing and the increased incidence of injuries," said [Thomas Best, MD, PhD,] who is also a professor and Pomerene chair in Ohio State's department of family medicine.
The participation and intensity of high school athletics has increased over the past decade. According to Best, some high school athletes spend more than 18 hours a week participating in athletics and many participate in multiple sports concurrently.
Watch the clip above to learn more about researchers' findings and recommendations.
Previously: Researchers call for improvements to health screenings for female college athletes and Stanford physician discusses prevalence of overuse injuries among college athletes
