Athlete Health
What is Athlete Health?
The riskiest sports for injuries are football, rugby, and ice hockey.
Sport is your greatest passion. You regularly engage in sports and consider it an essential part of your daily life. Or perhaps your biggest dream is to play sports. Whenever you have time, you run around the indoor soccer field with your friends. Maybe on vacation days, like in school years, you try to prove how competitive you are in basketball. Do you know that there is a risk of injury while playing sports? Sports injuries are one of the most important medical specialties today, whether you are a professional or amateur.
It is recommended that people considering sports should undergo medical examination and determine the risk factors related to the sport they are interested in. Especially in starting sports at a young age, the role of the doctor in choosing the sports branch is of great importance.
Football is the riskiest sport in terms of injury frequency. After football, contact sports such as rugby, ice hockey, and basketball follow. It is stated that high-speed sports such as motorcycle, car, and skiing are the most risky in terms of injury severity.
Soft tissue trauma is the most common type of sports injury. Muscle and skeletal injuries are more common in the lower extremities. Among direct contact sports, football is one of the sports with the highest risk of injury. Direct contact is responsible for approximately 50% of injuries. Only 30% of injuries are due to fouls. Defensive players are more prone to injury than other players. Most football injuries occur in the lower extremities. In different studies, this rate varies between 56-76%. This is followed by upper extremity injuries at 23% and head injuries at 14%.
How are Sports Injuries Diagnosed?
The diagnosis of sports injuries is based primarily on predicting the damage to the athlete by taking an experienced and detailed history of how the injury occurred. It is stated that the diagnosis is confirmed by physical examination of the patient and necessary imaging techniques. Since sports injuries are mostly related to muscle and skeletal system injuries, conventional X-rays and tomography are used to show the bone structure in imaging, and MRI imaging is used to show soft tissues.
How is Treatment Done?
The aim of treating sports injuries is to return the athlete to sports with the best possible performance in the shortest possible time that will not prolong or repeat the injury. Treatment is mainly divided into conservative and surgical treatment.
Medical and physical therapy are parts of conservative treatment. Regardless of the method used in the treatment of injuries to the musculoskeletal system, the desired outcome is to maintain the player's flexibility and joint range of motion during the healing process, and to enable them to return to sports as soon as possible without causing a decrease in muscle strength or resistance. If surgery can bring the athlete back to sports in a shorter time or with better performance than conservative treatment, then it should be the preferred treatment. Recent advances in surgical techniques in sports traumatology include chondroplasty, free cartilage transplantation, arthroscopy being easily applicable to different joints, and new techniques in meniscus and ligament surgeries.
