Discussion
This study aimed to describe and compare intracurricular IR and exposure times by sport, by sex and by curriculum year in a Dutch PETE facility.
Intracurricular IRS were highest during gymnastics, team ball games, and track and field. Within 39% of the total intracurricular exposure time, 76% of all injuries were sustained during participation in one of these three sports. The remaining 24% of injuries occurred in the other sports in 61% of the total intracurricular exposure time. Over the curriculum years, distributions of exposure times for sports categories showed only small deviations from the overall distribution (Cramer’s V=0.07). Therefore, the much higher IR for gymnastics, team ball sports and track and field compared with other sports could not be attributed to the high increase in exposure time (thus physical load) during the first year and vice versa. This assumption is confirmed by the fact that, after the first year, IR’s for all sports categories decreased in similar patterns. The second finding of our study was the consistently higher IR for female PETE students over all intracurricular sports and all curriculum years.
The higher IR for gymnastics, team ball sports and track and field are compatible with previous studies.1 5 Our new findings show that high IR for these activities are not directly associated with the higher IR during the first year. These findings suggest that differential preventive measures should be considered. On the one hand, results from this study stress the importance of identifying factors that modify physical fitness and (spikes in) load for first-year students.12 26 Both intracurricular planning of sports classes and the congestion of intracurricular and extracurricular loads (ie, senior level sports, student life, travel) should be considered.27 On the other hand, high-risk activities and risk factors contributing to the high IR’s for gymnastics, team ball sports and track and field need to be investigated.11 28 More insight into these injuries’ exact nature and locations per sports and curriculum year is needed.11 Next to known specific risk factors for injuries in the sports mentioned above,29 their combined load and factors related to learning new motor skills need to be considered.
The higher IRs for all sports (categories) for female than for male PETE students shows that this difference cannot be attributed to specific sports. The higher rate for female students in mixed sport classes is not in line with the almost equal incidence rates found for male and female athletes between 15 and 24 years in the general Dutch sports population.8 In collegiate sports, sex-specific injury risks differ between sports.7 9 Like sports in the general population collegiate sports are not mixed, an important difference in comparison with PETE sports. Previous studies on PETE students did not find significantly increased overall intracurricular IRs for female students during the first year2 3 16 or the full curriculum.1 The more than 1000 included students resulted in the current study being more statistically powered than all previous studies. Our results, however, are in line with results from studies on mixed military populations.30 Differences between sexes in anthropometric, biomechanical and physical fitness parameters have been identified as risk factors in military populations.31 32 Such differences could lead to unlevelled interactions in mixed team sports and a higher relative cumulative load for female students, making them more injury-prone than male students. A sex-based approach implies that these intrinsic factors cannot be influenced. Parsons et al argue that a gender-based difference in approach as a social construct is a modifiable extrinsic factor.33 This implies that a more gender-neutral approach could reduce anthropometric, biomechanical and physical differences between sexes. Whether these differences between sexes are present in PETE students, requires further context-specific investigation.10 The higher IRs we found for female students were also consistent for all curriculum years. This implies that preventive strategies for female PETE students need to target all sports and all curriculum years. For that, the exact nature and location of sustained injuries, and possible (gender-based) differences between sports, curriculum years and sexes need to be investigated.
A limitation of our study was that IR, similar to previous studies on PETE students, were calculated by dividing the number of injuries by the total exposure time for all students. The fact that a student may not have actively participated in classes due to injury (or other reasons) was not corrected. Therefore, true exposure times were presumably lower than reported.34 In addition, our retrospective analysis was based on voluntary medical consultations of new injuries only, and not all registered injuries (in particular gradual onset injuries) could be attributed to a single sport. Combined with differences in injury definitions,35 these will have led to lower IR’s than other studies on injury risks in PETE students.1–3 15 Another limitation of our study was that extracurricular injuries were not included in our analysis because extracurricular exposure times were not recorded. High increases in cumulative intracurricular and extracurricular exposure times might contribute to higher injury risks during the first year. In contrast, expertise from extracurricular sports participation might influence injury risks for specific intracurricular sports.36 These and other possible factors contributing to intracurricular injury risks need to be investigated from a socioecological perspective to develop adequate preventive and rehabilitative measures.10
A limitation of our analyses based on incidence rates is that the burden of injuries, apart from incidence rate, exposure time and the number of participants, is affected by the injury duration. Therefore, future studies should include registration of all relevant parameters to compare the true burden of injuries in PETE studies.37
Our study period from 2000 to 2014 is another limitation. However, time trends showed considerable increases in the 2×4 MA for overall IR in both male and female students and for gymnastics, team ball sports and track and field. These trends, combined with the fact that current curricula still include 280 hours of sports classes per year, make extrapolation of our results to current PETE studies plausible. Intercultural differences in sports participation need to be considered when extrapolating our results to populations in other countries.2 5 16 A higher risk for first-year students can also be expected in other studies with high sporting loads in the first year. The compatibility of the higher injury risk for female PETE students, found in our study, with results from military studies, suggests that mixed sports participation between sexes puts female participants at higher risk of injury.30 38