Fewer Kids Getting Hurt in Most Sports, Study Finds

However, football and soccer injuries have risen over past decade

By Carina Storrs

HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, March 19 (HealthDay News) -- Football has been blamed for a growing number of injuries among young players in the past decade, but a new study finds that football is an exception, and injuries from most other popular sports have dropped in children.

The study compared the number of injuries in children aged between 5 and 14 that occurred in 2000, 2005 and 2010 based on a national survey of the emergency rooms of about 100 hospitals.

It focused on eight popular activities: football, basketball, baseball/softball, soccer, bicycling, roller sports such as skating, playground use and trampoline use.

The study is scheduled for presentation Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, in Chicago.

"Physicians and children's hospitals have reported an increase in injuries from pediatric sports and the number of surgeries on kids [but] there was no population-based study to see if there is a real increase," said study author Dr. Shital Parikh, an associate professor of pediatric surgery at Cincinnati Children's Hospital.

Parikh's analysis suggests that the number of acute injuries, in particular sprains and fractures, has declined over the past decade. The study does not, however, address trends in chronic wear-and-tear damage and injuries that require surgery, such as a torn ligament, and these types of injuries have probably increased, he said.

The study found a more than 13 percent decrease in the rate of injuries seen in emergency rooms between 2000 and 2005 but only a roughly 1 percent decrease between 2000 and 2010.

The rebound in the number of injuries in 2010 appears to be due largely to an increase in the injuries related to football, baseball/softball and soccer between 2005 and 2010.

Looking at the population using U.S. Census Bureau data, Parikh found that for every 1,000 children, 31.9 sustained an injury in 2000 whereas 27.6 and 31.6 did so in 2005 and 2010, respectively.

The biggest drop in injury rate was for bicycling, which saw a more than 29 percent decrease between 2000 and 2005 and a 38 percent decrease overall. During this decade, the sport went from the most dangerous to the second most dangerous.

There were also drops in roller-sport and trampoline injuries of nearly 21 percent and 17.5 percent, respectively, between 2000 and 2010, and to a lesser extent, fewer injuries related to basketball.

Football injury rates, however, shot up by nearly 23 percent between 2000 and 2010, and soccer injuries rose by almost 11 percent.

Muscle and skeletal injuries, such as fractures, sprains and bruises from football and soccer rose by about 24 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Rates of these injuries declined for the other sports, except for baseball and softball, which saw a 2.5 percent increase.

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