Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center

Intoduction

A new paper from members of Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center has been published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine describing a new method for recording overuse injuries in sports.

“Overuse injuries present a particular problem in injury-prevention research, because it is extremely challenging to measure their occurrence and their consequences,” says primary author Benjamin Clarsen (picture).

“We know from previous studies that overuse injuries are very common in sport, however the current methods used to register injuries in sports medicine research fail to reflect their true impact.”

The article suggests a new approach is necessary to capture the true rate of overuse problems.

Instead of defining a recordable injury and then registering problems as they occur, the new method involves the administration of a new overuse injury questionnaire to an entire group of athletes at regular intervals throughout the course of a study.

In order to validate the new method it was used in a prospective study of 313 elite Norwegian athletes from 5 different sports:

Cross-country skiing, Floorball (bandy), handball, road cycling and volleyball. Overuse injuries were recorded among these athletes over a three-month period using both traditional methods of injury registration as well as the new method.

A completely different picture

In comparison to traditional methods, the new method was able to record more than 10-times as many overuse problems and show that 75% rather than 11% of athletes experienced some form of overuse problem during the three-month study. The new method also provided a far more nuanced reflection of the impact that overuse injuries had on athletes’ sports participation, training volume and sporting performance.

A new research area

This article signifies a new research area for OSTRC; the prevention of overuse injuries in sport.

“Using this method, we can start to address some important and challenging sports injury problems,” says co-author Dr Grethe Myklebust. “In fact,” she adds, “we are already using it in a number of exciting projects!”

The PI of this novel project is Professor Roald Bahr.