Is Rugby Safe?

 
    		 
     

    USRFF-Funded Injury Study Published

    Wednesday Feb 6, 2008 - A new study detailing injury rates to U.S. high school rugby athletes concluded that rugby is as safe as, or safer, than other contact sports.

    The large-scale study – titled “Injuries Sustained by High School Rugby Players in the United States, 2005-2006” and published in the January 2008 issue of the Journal Archives of Pediatrics – is the first to analyze injury rates and identify possible injury risk factors among U.S. high school rugby players.

    During the 2005 and 2006 U.S. rugby seasons, 121 participating clubs submitted weekly online reports documenting the number of players at practices and the number of players who participated in matches. In addition, teams submitted detailed injury reports, which included player information, type of injury and injury event. Researchers compiled and analyzed the results. Some of the study’s primary findings include:

    ·  The overall injury rate was 5.2 injuries per 1000 total rugby athletic exposures (practices and matches), a rate similar to other contact sports

    ·  Of the 594 reported injuries, 87% of the injured players were male and 13% were female

    ·  The most common injuries were to the head (21.7%), ankle (13.3%), shoulder (12.8%) and knee (11.1%)

    ·  Fractures (16%), concussions (15.8%) and incomplete ligament sprains (15.7%) were the most common injury diagnoses

    ·  Nearly 31% of injuries occurred while the player was being tackled, nearly 29% occurred while the player was tackling and 14% occurred in rucks: these three activities contributed to 87% of concussions

    One alarming discovery was that one in five injuries were to the head; most of these were concussions. These findings suggest that coaches and medical personnel should be educated on concussion prevention, identification and treatment to help decrease the number of serious head injuries.

    “The days of the macho ‘having your bell rung and playing on’ are gone,” says Dr Lyle Micheli, Professor of Orthopedic Sports Medicine at Harvard and a co author of the study. “Concussion is a serious injury which may have long term consequences, particularly if a second one is incurred before the initial symptoms have resolved.”

    As the popularity of high school rugby grows, concerns over the risk of injury will undoubtedly increase. Consequently, researchers urge ongoing studies to monitor injury rates and patterns, develop preventive interventions and evaluate the effectiveness of such measures.

    The study was funded by the United States Rugby Football Foundation and is available at www.archpediatrics.com: http://archpedi.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/162/1/49.

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      Is Rugby a Safe Sport for America’s Youth?

      -Commentary by Past President of the American College of Sports Medicine: Dr. Lyle J. Micheli, MD

      I support efforts to establish rugby teams in American high schools and colleges, and wish to alleviate any possible concerns about the sport’s relative safety.  I think I offer a unique perspective on the subject given that:

      •   I have been closely involved in rugby as a player and supporter since the early 1960s when I began playing the sport as a Harvard undergraduate, and

      •  I am a physician who is a past president of the American College of Sports Medicine; I am the author of over 200 scholarly journal articles on sports medicine (including the first-ever published study of rugby injuries in the United States); in my practice I have treated athletes of all ages from sports as varied as figure skating and football; and I am the chairman of the Massachusetts Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

      A Popular Sport Worldwide

      Rugby is a dynamic contact sport that is played all over the world by men and women of all different classes, creeds, and races. It fosters friendship and camaraderie between players. To celebrate one recent Christmas, men from the American and New Zealand research stations in Antarctica played a game of rugby against each other on those southernmost frozen wastelands. Most rugby players have played with and against people from other nations.

      Rugby is played in over 100 countries and is the most popular team sport in nations such as Japan, Fiji, and Wales. This sport could not be as popular as it is among the peoples of so many different cultures if it were dangerous! In fact, the risk of injury in rugby is relatively low compared to sports Americans embrace – such as football, ice hockey, and lacrosse - a fact borne-out by numerous studies to ascertain the risk of sports injury in different activities. The reasons for this are quite straightforward to those of us who study sports medicine

      Why Rugby is a Safe Sport – Paradoxically

      The main reason rugby players have a relatively low risk of injury compared to football players is paradoxical – rugby players don’t wear protective equipment. Thus the rugby player doesn’t have the same disregard for the safety of his or her head, neck, and shoulders when tackling or trying to break through a tackle. The other reason is that unlike football, rugby is a game of possession, not yardage. Consequently rugby players don’t tackle by “driving through the numbers,” as football players are taught to do with their heads when tackling a player. In rugby, players are taught to use their arms to wrap a player’s legs and let the momentum of that player cause him to go to ground. Furthermore, in rugby there is no blocking, and so players who don’t have the ball don’t get hit when they’re not expecting it.

      One reason rugby has a reputation for being “dangerous” in the United States is because when the average American sees rugby being played, they see a free-flowing contact sport. Because it doesn’t have the familiar stop-and-start character of football or other TV-shaped sports, to the uninitiated rugby can appear confusing and “scary.”

      Furthermore, while the bumps, bruises, and scrapes you see on the elbows, knees, and faces of many rugby players can appear alarming, they are of considerably less concern than the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) ruptures, finger fractures and dislocations, and chest contusions characteristic of a sport such as football in which heavy protective equipment is worn.

      Injury Rates

      I performed one of the first studies of rugby injuries in the United States, which showed that compared to football, the incidence of injury in rugby is quite low (10 percent in American club rugby compared to 52 percent in NCAA college football). My study was published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Sports Medicine. Subsequent studies have supported my results.  It would be disingenuous to suggest that rugby players never get injured. However, based on the numerous studies that have been done, the scientific conclusion we must reach is that rugby is not as injurious as certain other contact and collision sports that most of us believe deserve NCAA status, and is a relatively safe sport in the panoply of athletic endeavors available to our young men and women.
      		 
           
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