Abstract
Background:
Sex differences in sports medicine are well documented. However, no studies to date have reviewed the rate at which sex is reported and analyzed in the athlete-specific orthopaedic sports medicine literature.
Purpose:
To determine the rates of reporting and analyzing patient sex in athlete-specific sports medicine literature.
Study Design:
Systematic review; Level of evidence, 4.
Methods:
Articles published by the 3 journals of the AOSSM (
Results:
Of the 5140 publications screened, 559 met the inclusion criteria. In total, 93.9% of all studies reported patient sex, and 34.7% of all studies analyzed patient sex. However, 143 studies only included males and 50 studies only included females (n = 193). When excluding these single-sex studies, analysis of the remaining 366 studies found that the rate of sex-specific analysis increased to 53.0%. Rates of reporting patient sex did not significantly differ by journal or by year. Similarly, rates of analyzing patient sex did not differ by year, but
Conclusion:
Patient sex is well reported in the athlete-specific sports medicine literature (93.9% of included studies reported sex), demonstrating that most studies include sex as a demographic variable. However, patient sex was analyzed only in 53.0% of studies that included both male and female patients. Given that athlete-specific sex differences are known to exist within the field of sports medicine, many studies that could benefit from using patient sex as a variable for analysis likely fail to do so.
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Supplementary Material
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