Injuries Related to Wakeboarding in Brazil: A Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

Wakeboard is an aquatic sport that has been growing in number of participants in several countries last years. Like other aquatic sports with high-speed and tricks with complex movements, wakeboarding involves a series of risks to practitioners and there are few recent scientific publications, and most of them are case reports. Method: It is a prospective cross-sectional study among wakeboarders with more than one year of practice, in which it has been collected demographic data, riding profile and information regarding the types of injuries presented by the participants, aiming to identify the most frequent injuries and correlates with variables, such as age, sex, body mass index, modality, frequency, and level of practice. For this, an online questionnaire was used and the data were analyzed with chi-square test when applicable. Results: The research had 157 valid responses, from which 124 (79%) declared to have had at least one injury related to wakeboarding. From them, 88% reported at least one skin wound, 69% reported muscular injury, 53% sprain, 18% joint dislocations, 18% bone fractures, 15% concussions and 3% reported other, such as accidents with animals. Equipment failure, such as inadequate size of boots or binding loose fixation, was appointed by 8% of the participants as a predisposing factor for sprains. Men had a relative risk of 1.47 of getting injured compared to women (IC 1.06 -2.05, p = 0.002). There were no statistically significant differences when comparing different ages, body mass index or modality (boat or cablepark). From the general musculoskeletal harms, 82% of the sprains and 50% of the bone fracture occurred on lower limbs, as the upper limbs were most affected on joint dislocation (87%). Sprains were most common on the knee (46%) and ankle joints (36%), and 70% of the sprains with ligament involvement affected the anterior cruciate ligament.