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Girl Softball Players Suffering More Shoulder Injuries
Too much throwing, too little conditioning may be to blame, study says
By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
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FRIDAY, Feb. 12 (HealthDay News) -- While shoulder injuries among boys playing high school baseball are common among pitchers, the same injuries among girl softball players are becoming common in several positions, a new study finds.
Moreover, these injuries tended to occur among boys during games, while among the girls shoulder injuries occurred most often during practice, the researchers say.
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"Injuries occurring in high school baseball and softball are primarily in the shoulder and are pretty serious," said researcher Kieran J. Fogarty, an associate professor at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.
"In baseball, these injuries are primarily with the pitchers; in softball we are seeing it with the first baseman, the catcher, and is equally distributed amongst most of the positions," he said.
Fogarty thinks softball injuries are due to lack of good training among these female high school athletes.
"There should be more emphasis on training the softball players as far as physical conditioning goes," he said.
High schools should employ athletic trainers and be aware of these repetitive-motion injuries, Fogarty added.
The report was released online Feb. 8 in advance of publication in the March print issue of Pediatrics.
For the study, Fogarty's team collected data on baseball and softball injuries for the 2005-2008 academic years from about 74 U.S. high schools. These data came from the High School Reporting Information Online.
Over the study period, the researchers identified 91 shoulder injuries among baseball players and 40 among softball players. The most common injuries were strains and tears accounting for 30.8 percent of the baseball and 35 percent of the softball injuries. Most of the softball injuries, 68.2 percent, happened during throwing, but not pitching, during practice. Only 23.5 percent of the injuries occurred during games.
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Copyright © 2010 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Last updated 2/12/2010
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SOURCES: Kieran J. Fogarty, Ph.D., associate professor, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Mich.; Karen Sheehan, M.D., medical director, Injury Prevention and Research Center, Children's Memorial Hospital, and medical director, Injury Free Coalition for Kids of Chicago; Robert Gotlin, D.O., director, Sports Rehabilitation, Beth Israel Medical Center, New York City; Feb. 8, 2010, Pediatrics, online
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