Rugby Sports Medicine literature: the week in review
(http://www.rugbydump.com/2014/12/4005/jean-de-villiers-injury-might-rule-him-out-of-rugby-world-cup-2015)
There were about 25 articles that flashed up on our radar this week as being applicable to Rugby and sport’s medicine. We have subjectively decided to focus on three of these 25 articles that we thought might be of particular interest to our readers (all happen to come from BJSM – this was a fluke…or not!):
- Get Set: prevent sports injuries with exercise! (Verhagen, BJSM):
- Get Set is a free app, developed by IOC, that provides prehabilitative exercises (similar to Safe Six) to prevent injuries for 30 sports (including rugby).
- The exercises are either sport- or region-specific and provide three levels to advance the difficulty of the exercises.
- Limitation: not clear if all exercises are “evidence-based” and there is no feedback/motivation to the user.
- Does long-distance air travel associated with the Sevens World Series increase players’ risk of injury? (Fuller et al. BJSM):
- Followed all players from the nine international teams consistently competing over five years of tournaments.
- There was insufficient evidence to show association with air travel or crossing time zones and injury risk/performance.
- Limitation: the study might be underpowered for examine effect of travel.
- Prevention of groin injuries in sports: a systematic review with meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials (Esteve et al., BJSM)
- Systematic review with meta-analysis of RCTs in football (american) and ice hockey that had groin-specific injury prev programs.
- Found a potentially clinically meaningful, but not statistically significant reduction (19%, on average).
- Limitation: low rate of groin injuries in studies generally, therefore difficult to assess effectiveness
In the interest of not over-burdening our readers, we’re going to leave it there for now, but feel free to let us know if you think we missed something this week!
Rugby Science 