When you read statistics that more than 400,000 children and teens cheerlead, and a quarter of them competitively cheerlead, you have to begin to think about the quantity and quality of the myriad of injuries that must occur in this sport? But just what are those injuries and how serious are they?
Currie et al. (10.1542/peds.2015-2447) give us an energized look at cheerleading injuries this week in a new study in our journal. The authors looked at data from the longitudinal National High School Sports-Related Injury Surveillance Study over 5 years to determine the overall injury rate in the sport, whether competition is worse than practice, and whether males or females have higher injury rates.
There is also data on types of injuries too. For example, the bad news is concussions lead the list, but the good news is that the concussion rate in this sport is lower than all other sports in the database. When we read this article we said hip-hip hooray for the authors compiling this interesting set of observations and for the paucity of hip injuries as well! Your cheerleading patients will give you a cheer for reading this study and then helping their cheerleading team develop targeted prevention efforts to reduce the injury rate further in this spirited sport.
