A prospective cohort study of sports injuries in Egyptian national team athletes

This study prospectively examined the injury patterns of Egyptian national team athletes for five months. The athletes were members of Egyptian Federation coactive teams participating in men's and women's fencing, weightlifting, and martial arts, and men's wrestling. The purpose of the study was to identify and analyze the incidence and severity of the sports injury problem and to illustrate any determinants as measured by those observed injury patterns. The study utilized an injury surveillance system for systematic data collection with injury risk factors under investigation including athlete's sport, gender, body area, body part injured, injury type, specific injury site, injury severity, and practice or game occurrence.;Unique challenges to the study were development of an injury surveillance system where none existed and utilization of the most current definitions of both reportable injury and injury severity. Four specific research questions provided the momentum and direction for the study. The questions specifically required the frequency and percentages of injuries, the injury incidence rates per 1000 athlete-exposures, the injury incidence rates for game and practice activity, and injury density ratios in the sport categories. The final question concerned specific determinants or predictors of injury severity.;Data was collected at the Olympic Center for National Teams in New Maadi, Cairo, Arab Republic of Egypt. The research team consisted of the author and principal investigator, a certified athletic trainer (ATC) and a professional colleague, Dr. Magdy Mustafa el-Sabagh, an Egyptian trained physician and head of the Sports Medicine Section at the Olympic Center.;Two types of data collection procedures were used. The Sports Ware 2000™ Injury Tracking Software was routinely used to record injury report information; the author also collected weekly participation data in order to calculate injury incidence rates.;Injury incident data was analyzed with nonparametric tests including chi-square and the binomial test. The 95% confidence interval for incidence rates was calculated using the Poisson distribution. Multiple regression/correlation techniques were used to examine the relations between injury severity as a dependent variable and the various sports variables to determine predictors of severe injuries.;Under analysis were 113 reportable injuries. Frequency tables were developed for each sport and each sport variable category. Injury incidence rates are reported for total, game, and practice exposures. Injury density ratios are reported for those sports with both game and practice injuries.;The results of the investigation contribute to the growing body of knowledge about surveillance techniques in sports medicine research. The study also provides information about the viability of using a surveillance system in an ongoing fashion to monitor sports-injury information about elite national athletes.