Abstract
Objectives:
Combat sports continue to be a popular form of recreation within the United States. With this continually increasing popularity and participation comes an increase in associated injuries as well. Despite this, there remains a paucity of studies characterizing injury patterns, types, and anatomic distributions of injuries sustained during participation in combat sports, thus necessitating further investigation. The goal of this study is to provide an updated description of injuries within combat sports, specifically to the upper extremity and presenting to US emergency departments (EDs). It is our hope that this information may be utilized by participants and trainers to help develop preventative strategies, as well as by health care professionals to diagnose patients and provide the appropriate treatment more readily and accurately.
Methods:
A retrospective analysis was performed utilizing data from the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission’s (CPSC) National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) between 2003 and 2022. Data were limited to product codes 1200 (unclassified sports or recreational activity), 1207 (boxing), 1270 (wrestling), and 3257 (martial arts). The year designation variable was added to each year’s remaining dataset, and all years were concatenated into a single compiled dataset containing 84,812 observations. Beginning in 2019, the NEISS database updated their gender designations to include sexes which were unidentified or non-binary. Designations of unidentified or nonbinary genders were removed from the dataset, reducing the sample size to 84,807 observations. Data were then filtered to include only injuries of the upper extremity, reducing sample size to 29,364. Anatomic regions of interest included shoulder, upper arm, elbow, forearm, wrist, hand, and fingers. Narratives were reviewed to remove unclassified injuries that did not describe a combat sport of any type, injuries where the reference was to a different primary cause, or terminology overlap. For example, boxing injuries occurring from punching bag arcade games were excluded. Finally, several diagnoses were excluded, such as contusion, crushing injuries, dermatitis, puncture wounds, hematomas, hemorrhages, and other/not stated. Diagnoses of interest included dislocations, fractures, and strains/sprains. The final sample size was 12,642. Injury rates for specific injury types and upper extremity subregions were described as percentages of total injuries, both within each sport category and across all sports. Injury rates were also assessed on a year-by-year basis, and year-to-year variation within and between sports was assessed using chi-square tests.
Results:
Of the 12,642 upper extremity injuries for which patients presented to US EDs between the years 2003 and 2022, nearly half were sustained from wrestling (6230, 49.3%) whereas the remaining half were more evenly distributed between boxing (3318, 26.2%) and martial arts (3094, 24.5%). There was a significant effect of time on injury distributions by sport (chi-square test: X2 =80.89, P < 0.001). Even when accounting for the years during COVID-19, significant differences between sports and over time were still detected.
When assessing anatomic regions injured by sport, wrestling unsurprisingly accounted for most shoulder (59.5%), upper arm (67.7%), elbow (75.3%), forearm (57.6%), and finger (50.3%) injuries given the amount of overall wrestling injuries compared to boxing and martial arts. Boxing, however, accounted for most hand (64.1%) and wrist (37.7%) injuries, despite fewer overall injuries compared to wrestling. The most frequently injured regions within boxing, wrestling, and martial arts were the hand (40.1%), shoulder, (33.8%), and shoulder (28%), respectively.
Regarding injury types, wrestling accounted for the highest percentage of each type, including dislocations (55.7%), fractures (46.9), and strains/sprains (50%). Remaining frequencies for dislocations, fractures, and strains/sprains were roughly equal in distributions for boxing and martial arts. Strains/sprains were much more common than dislocations in each sport as well, with a ~4:1 ratio in boxing, and a ~3:1 ratio in wrestling and in martial arts.
The most common specific injuries (anatomic region + injury type) sustained across all sports were shoulder strain/sprain (14.7%), followed by hand fractures (13.1%), wrist strain/sprain (9.5%), finger fractures (8.7%), forearm fractures (7.2%), shoulder dislocation (7.1%), finger strain/sprain (6.4%), shoulder fractures (6.2%), wrist fractures (5.4%), and elbow strain/sprain (5.0%). Wrestling accounted for most of these injuries; however, boxing accounted for the majority of hand fractures and dislocations, as well as strains/sprains of the wrist and upper arm.
Conclusions:
This study demonstrates significant variability in pattern and location of injuries sustained from wrestling, boxing, and martial arts. By providing updated insight regarding the temporal trends and injury patterns to the upper extremity in boxing, wrestling, and martial arts, this study may assist in the efforts to continue advancing safety measures in a group of sports that continues to gain interest in the United States.
