Musculoskeletal injuries in British Army recruits: a prospective study of diagnosis-specific incidence and rehabilitation times

Sharma, J., Greeves, J.P., Byers, M., Bennett, A.N. and Spears, I.R. ORCID: 0000-0003-4982-2841, 2015. Musculoskeletal injuries in British Army recruits: a prospective study of diagnosis-specific incidence and rehabilitation times. BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, 16 (1): 106. ISSN 1471-2474

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Abstract

Background: Musculoskeletal injuries during initial military training are a significant medical problem facing military organisations globally. In order to develop an injury management programme, this study aims to quantify the incidence and rehabilitation times for injury specific diagnoses.

Methods: This was a prospective follow-up study of musculoskeletal injuries in 6608 British Army recruits during a 26-week initial military training programme over a 2-year period. Incidence and rehabilitation times for injury specific diagnoses were recorded and analysed.

Results: During the study period the overall incidence of musculoskeletal injuries was 48.6%, and the most common diagnosis was iliotibial band syndrome (6.2%). A significant proportion of the injuries occurred during the first 11 weeks of the programme. The longest rehabilitation times were for stress fractures of the femur, calcaneus and tibia (116 ± 17 days, 92 ± 12 days, and 85 ± 11 days, respectively). The combination of high incidence and lengthy rehabilitation indicates that medial tibial stress syndrome had the greatest impact on training, accounting for almost 20% of all days spent in rehabilitation.

Conclusion: When setting prevention priorities consideration should be given to both the incidence of specific injury diagnoses and their associated time to recovery.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders
Creators:	Sharma, J., Greeves, J.P., Byers, M., Bennett, A.N. and Spears, I.R.
Publisher:	BioMed Central
Date:	2015
Volume:	16
Number:	1
ISSN:	1471-2474
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1186/s12891-015-0558-6 DOI 558 Publisher Item Identifier
Rights:	© 2015 Sharma et al.; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	12 Aug 2019 11:35
Last Modified:	12 Aug 2019 11:35
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/37227

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