Players' attitudes to mouthguards and prevalence of orofacial injuries in the 1987 U.S. Rugby Football Team

Abstract

This report shows that although 95.4% of players in the U.S. Rugby Team believed mouthguards provided local protection, only half wore a mouthguard. How ever, 90.9% of mouthguard wearers would not play without their mouthguard and 54.5% believed wearing mouthguards should be made compulsory in rugby football. Approximately one-third of the team had sus tained an orofacial injury that required treatment and none were wearing a mouthguard at the time of injury. These and other results are compared to an identical study of the 1984 Australian Rugby Team, the only previous such study reported.