Blog #7: How Common Are Knee Injuries? By Chris Schattinger, MS(c), CSCS, CISSN
Before diving any further into knee injuries, we must establish the overall frequency of knee injuries, differences in frequency between genders and the modality by which they occur. If you were to search on three separate websites for the number of knee injuries that occur each year you may find three different answers. For this blog post we will present statistics by Gage et al. (2012) who monitored knee injuries presented to the US Emergency Department from 1988 to 2008. The authors estimated that there were 2.5 million sports related knee injuries admitted to the emergency department every year. Epidemiologic data revealed there were slightly more males with knee injuries than females (3,478,749 vs. 3,184,490) and this is equated to the fact that more males participate in sports. Of the males in the study, 80% of knee injuries occurred in the age range of 5-44 while 65% occurred in the age range of 15-64 for females. Surprisingly, sports were not the greatest cause of knee injury in each group as females had 36% of knee injuries occur via sports but had 40% occur by home structures (I assume this to be things like stairs but it is not explicitly defined). Most males did acquire a knee injury via sports (62%). In terms of the type of knee injury, 80% of males age 5-44 suffered a knee sprain while 65% of females age 15-64 suffered a knee sprain. The grade of the sprain was not mentioned in the study therefore all the reported sprains could be minor tears or complete ruptures of a ligament in the knee. What do you think about these statistics? Let us know by tweeting us your thoughts and leave any comments or questions in the comments area! In the next blog post we will dive in to the anatomy of the knee!