Orthopedic Injuries in Professional Surfers: A Retrospective Study at a Single Orthopedic Center

Abstract

The most common orthopedic injuries in professional surfers involve the knee, ankle, shoulder, hip, and back. Surfers' rear extremities were preferentially injured which is the extremity responsible for power and torque. Shoulder injuries increased the probability of an operative intervention. Last, overuse injuries (femoral-acetabular impingement, rotator cuffs) occurred in the older surf population compared with more acute injuries (ankle sprains/fractures, anterior cruciate ligament tears) which is also consistent with time to surgery.

Epidemiology of Acute Injuries in Surfing: Type, Location, Mechanism, Severity, and Incidence: A Systematic Review

“…The literature on acute surfing injuries outlines injury data from many countries around the world and presents both local and global data. Of the studies included in this literature review, acute injury data from eight countries was represented among 16 studies and three studies collected data globally [14,25,27]. Of the 16 studies from specific countries, six were from Australia, three were from Brazil, two were from the UK, two were from the USA, and Japan, Portugal and Norway each had one study ( Figure 2).…”

“…Overall variation in skin injury percentages between studies was from 17.2% in Furness et al [18] to 75% in De Moraes et al [17]. Hohn et al [14] was the only study which did not include a category for skin injuries. Full breakdown of types of injuries represented in the literature can be seen in Figure 4.…”

“…There is again variability in reporting of body region within the literature, some studies breaking body region into 18 different segments to choose from as in Burgess et al [13] while other studies only provided five regions to choose from as in Hohn et al [14] whose regions were limited to knee, ankle, shoulder, hip, back and other. For simplicity, this review categorized injury location into six body regions: face/head/neck, lower limb (inclusive of hip/groin to toes), upper limb/arm (inclusive of shoulder to fingers), torso (inclusive of pelvis, thorax, ribs, abdomen and chest), spine/back (inclusive of cervical, thoracic, lumbar spine and back), and other (inclusive of other and unspecified regions).…”

“…Information on injury type, location, severity and mechanism has been documented from the earliest study by Allen et al [12] who examined acute surfing injuries at Waikiki, Hawaii to more recent studies by Burgess et al [13], Dimmick et al [6], Hohn et al [14] and Inada et al [15] examining acute surfing injuries in Australia (New South Wales), Australia (Queensland), globally from WSL data and in Japan respectively. Various studies have provided data from a number of sources; online surveys, emergency departments (ED) and medical records have been used to collect primarily retrospective data [5][6][7][8][9][10][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. Medical services at surfing competitions have also been used to collect prospective data, however, to our knowledge only two studies to date have been conducted so far [6,27].…”

“…To our knowledge only two studies have attempted to collate and synthesise some of the acute surfing injury data, Donosa and Cabral [28], and Nathanson [29]. While both studies summarised injury type, location and mechanism data from six and 11 studies respectively, several epidemiological studies were not included [6,7,[12][13][14][15]18,20,24,26] Furthermore, there have been numerous epidemiological studies published following the 2015 publication by Donosa [6,7,[13][14][15]18,20,24,26]. Therefore, an updated review of the literature is needed to gain a comprehensive understanding of acute surfing injuries around the world, between various populations (ages and competition levels), and through different data collection settings.…”