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Thursday, November 21, 2024
Washington, DC, USA


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Sport and Injuries
What You Need To Know

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Statistics on Sports Injuries
You Need to Know Before your Children Participates in Any Sports


The top three reasons: adults, coaches and parents.
Among athletes ages 5 to 14, 28 percent of percent of football players,

25 percent of baseball players, 22 percent of soccer players, 15 percent of basketball players, and 12 percent of softball players were injured while playing their respective sports.

Study also found that 70 percent of athletes said they had practiced or played with an injury, compared with 33 percent of non-athletes.

Forty percent of athletes were diagnosed with osteoarthritis after college, compared with 24 percent of non-athletes.

A 2007 study found that, in high school and college football, there are an average of 7.23 catastrophic head injuries per year: there were 0.67 injuries per 100,000 high school players and 0.21 injuries per 100,000 college players.

In the U.S., about 30 million children and teens participate in some form of organized sports, and more than 3.5 million injuries each year, which cause some loss of time of participation, are experienced by the participants. Almost one-third of all injuries incurred in childhood are sports-related injuries.

What Are Head Injuries
How Should We Consider Them

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Head Injuries?
Head injuries are dangerous. They can lead to permanent disability, mental impairment, and even death. To most people, head injuries are considered an acceptable risk when engaging in sports and other types of recreational activities. But there are steps you can take to lower the risk and protect yourself and your children.

What Are Head Injuries?

Head injuries are injuries to the scalp, skull, or brain caused by trauma. Concussions are the most common type of sports-related brain injury with an estimated 1.6 million to 3.8 million sports-related concussions a year. A concussion is a type of traumatic brain injury (TBI) that happens when the brain is jarred or shaken hard enough to bounce against the skull. This can happen when two athletes collide or when someone falls and hits his or her head. It can also result from being hit in the head with a piece of sporting equipment. In a sport such as soccer, even "heading" the ball can cause a concussion. A concussion causes an alteration of a person's mental status and can disrupt the normal functioning of the brain. Multiple concussions can have a long-lasting, cumulative life-changing effect.

You don't have to be hit in the head to experience a concussion. An impact elsewhere on the body can create enough force to jar the brain. You also won't necessarily lose consciousness with a concussion. Concussions range from mild to severe. The effects may be apparent immediately, or they may not show up until hours or even days later.

Other types of TBIs are a contusion, which is a bruise on the brain that can cause swelling, and a hematoma, which is bleeding in the brain that collects and forms a clot. A skull fracture is another type of head injury that can affect the brain. Sometimes with a fracture, pieces of bone can cut into the brain and cause bleeding and other types of injury.

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