Epidemiology of athletic knee injuries: A 10-year study
Introduction
Sporting activities have become important components of modern life as most people have more leisure time. There has been a steadily increasing number of men and women who have become members of fitness studios and sport clubs. The German Sports Society, for example, had 26 million members in 1998 and 27 million by 2003 [1].
It is primarily sports with a high rate of injuries, such as snowboarding, inline skating and mountain biking, that have become more and more popular [2]. The increasing popularity of such sports is concomitant with an increasing number of injuries. It is usually the lower extremity that is involved, especially the knee [3]. In spite of the wide range of injuries and diseases of the anatomically and biomechanically complex knee joint, there are only a few studies available describing the type and frequency of knee injuries. Such knowledge should be important for sports medicine physicians and orthopaedic surgeons, and may help to improve their clinical skills and to prevent sports injuries of the knee.
We thus conducted a detailed analysis of all sports related knee injuries treated in our clinic.
Section snippets
Materials and methods
Over a 10-year period, all patients with sports injuries treated in our clinic were documented in a specially designed computer program. Since the implementation of the computerized case history, 17,397 patients with 1530 injuries have been analyzed. 6434 patients (37%) with 19,530 injuries (39.8%) were related to the knee joint. 68.1% of the patients were men, 31.6% were women and the remaining 0.3% were of ambiguous gender.
Injury documentation included the patients' age, gender, sport,
Results
In 33.9% of the cases, minor knee distortions occurred without damage to any particular structure. Acute and chronic lesions of joint cartilage were seen in 10.6% of the patients. Contusions caused by a direct trauma were diagnosed in 5.5% of the cases. Dislocations, primarily of the patella, accounted for 3.3% of the injuries. Knee dislocations were encountered rarely. Fractures of the three bones of the knee joint were seen only in 0.95% of the cases. Superficial skin wounds were seen in
Discussion
The knee is under strain in daily life as well as, to a higher degree, during sporting activities. In addition to the surroundings muscles, there are passive stabilizers of the joint such as the ligaments, menisci, and the joint capsule that play important roles in stabilizing the joint. When secondary stabilizers in the knee are injured during a sports accident, it can lead to an overuse of other internal knee structures. Steinbrück showed that 32.6% of all sports injuries involve the knee [2]
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