Soccerfan2
GOLD
“Anterior cruciate ligament injuries are generally regarded as a particular concern for female athletes, with multiple previous studies, including those by Agel et al22 and Arendt et al,17 who reported higher rates of injury among females. Unfortunately, the plethora of such studies has led to a common belief that ACL injury is a problem for female athletes only. For example, Chappell et al19 claimed simply that female athletes have a higher risk of ACL injuries than male athletes. This assertion has been perpetuated because so few researchers have evaluated the overall incidence of ACL injuries and ACL injury rates across large numbers of sports. As shown in Table 1, football, a male sport, had the largest number of ACL injuries and also the highest competition-related ACL injury rate of the 9 sports we studied. In fact, we found no significant sex difference in ACL injury rates when all 9 sports were considered, only seeing a significantly higher rate in females when limiting analyses to sex-comparable sports (soccer, basketball, and baseball or softball). This is consistent with Mountcastle et al,20 who similarly found no sex difference between overall rates of ACL injury. Rates, however, are only one way to evaluate burden; incidence should also be considered. The high incidence of ACL injuries in football compared with other sports also demonstrates that ACL injuries are not limited to female athletes. In fact, given the large number of US high school football players relative to the number of girls’ basketball and soccer players,1 in terms of numbers of patients treated, sports medicine clinicians are more likely to treat a male high school athlete with an ACL injury than a female high school athlete with an ACL injury. Thus, in terms of sex, the burden of ACL injury is relative to the clinical or research question being asked. Although effective injury-prevention programs may need to be sex specific, given the large numbers of male athletes sustaining ACL injuries, efforts to create effective pro- grams should not be solely targeted to female athletes.”
http://natajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.4085/1062-6050-48.6.03?code=nata-site
http://natajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.4085/1062-6050-48.6.03?code=nata-site