Prevalence and Injury Profile in Portuguese Children and Adolescents According to Their Level of Sports Participation – Epidemiological Study

Abstract

Background: It is becoming increasingly apparent that sports can present a danger to health in the form of sports injuries. The extent of sports injury problem calls for preventive actions based on the results of epidemiological research. Purpose: Determine the prevalence and injury profile in Portuguese children and adolescents from different groups of sports participation and identify significant predictors of injury. Methods: Two questionnaires (LESADO and RAPIL 2) were distributed to 651 subjects aged between 10 and 18 years involved in different levels of Physical Activity (PA). Bone age and anthropometric measures were also evaluated. Descriptive statistics was used to determine prevalence and injury profile, chi-square test and binary logistic regression to identify significant predictors of injury. Results: A total of 247 subjects (37.9%) reported experiencing a sports injury during the previous 6 months. The most injured body areas were lower limbs (53.8%), followed by upper limbs (29.0%). The type of injuries found was strains (33,7%), sprains (27,1%) and fractures (23,1%). Mainly, the occurrences took place in practice (74.0%) and the most frequent causes were direct trauma (51,9%), indirect trauma (29,5%) and overuse (12,7%). A high percentage was relapses and chronic injuries (40,9%). Boys were found to experience significantly more sports injuries than girls for the decimal ages 12-13 years (χ2 = 6.608, p = .014) and for the bone ages 14-15 years (χ2 = 6.76, p = .010). The OR for age group was 2.26 suggesting that those ≥16 years were 2.26 times more likely to have an injury than the younger subjects and concerning the PA level, the school sports and federated sports subjects were 4.21 and 4.44 times more likely to have an injury than non sports subjects. Conclusions: Sports injuries in school age children were predominantly minor conditions where sprains and strains were the major injuries encountered. They result mostly of trauma situations that occur in practice and lower and upper limbs were the most affected areas. Injury occurrence increases with age and is higher in school and federated athletes. Sex was only differentiator at the decimal age of 12-13 years and at the bone age of 14-15 years and it was deeply related to the PA category.