Fall and injury incidence rates of jockeys while racing in Ireland, France and Britain
Section snippets
Methods
Sufficient epidemiological data were needed to categorise and prioritise the different types of injury involved in equestrian racing and to compare the collected data with the already published figures. Relevant literature was found through the PubMed, Medline and Sport Discus databases and Google and Google Scholar, during 2006 and 2007. Keywords used for searches included equestrian injury, horse racing injury, jockey injury, head injury, sports injury, horse injury, brain injury and
Ireland
Eight years of jockey injury data for jump, point-to-point and flat racing are summarised in Table 1a, compared in Table 1b and presented in detail on an annualised basis in Table A1. All injuries associated with these data led to jockeys being ‘stood down’ from riding for various periods of time.
From the Poisson regression it was seen that the yearly incidence rates for concussions/ride, falls/ride and injuries/ride did not change significantly. An exception for this was for jump racing, where
Discussion
Ireland, France and Britain were the three racing jurisdictions around the world for which detailed levels of accident and injury data were available. Unfortunately, this information was neither reported nor presented uniformly. The severity of concussion was defined using different criteria after 2003 for the British data, the time off work arising from an injury was characterised differently and not every country presented annual injury rates. Presenting such data annually in a harmonised
Conclusions
Horse racing is a high-risk sport with high incidence rates of concussion and head injury amongst flat and jump racing jockeys. Of all jockeys, it is amateur jump racing jockeys who fell most frequently in Ireland, France and Britain. Jump racing also had the highest rates of injury/ride amongst both amateur and professional jockeys. Flat racing, however, had the highest rates of injuries/fall (34–44%). While there is a paucity of worldwide equestrian injury data and a lack of uniformity in the
Conflict of interest
The authors have no conflict of interest in this work.
Acknowledgements
Financial support in the form of a PhD stipend was provided to MAFR by the Turf Club during the course of this research. Dr. Benoit LeMasson of France Galop kindly provided the authors with French jockey injury data. The assistance of Mr. Peter T. O’Neill of the UCD School of Electrical, Electronic & Mechanical Engineering with the R statistical analysis software is gratefully acknowledged.
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