Study finds injuries soaring in professional rugby union

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Injuries to top rugby union players have nearly doubled since the sport turned professional five years ago and researchers think the use of protective equipment could be part of the reason.

Since 1995, when the sport turned pro after the second World Cup in South Africa, the proportion of players who have been injured jumped from 27 percent to 47 percent even though the number of players and the hours of competition have decreased.

Research by Professor William Garraway, an Edinburgh-based epidemiologist, says the use of padded equipment was one possible explanation.

Others were changes in the rules of the sport, the training or the fitness of players and their aggressiveness in tackling. Most of the injuries occurred during tackles.

"The International Rugby Board (IRB), which is the authority that controls rugby union football, should be putting funds into a range of studies to establish why this striking increase in injuries has occurred," Garraway said in a telephone interview.

But he added that apart from mouth guards, there is no scientific evidence supporting the use of shoulder and shin pads which have been worn since the sport turned professional.

"At a practical level they (the IRB) could call a moratorium on the use of protective equipment in competitive matches until it could be established whether or not this is providing players with a false sense of security which makes them go harder into the tackle," he added.

Garraway and his colleagues compared the number of injuries among 803 rugby union players during the 1997-98 season with those in the 1993-94 season when the sport was entirely amateur. Their research is published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

They discovered that an injury occurred every two matches in the professional game, compared to an injury every 3.4 matches in 1993-94. Most of the injuries were ligament and muscle damage to the knees.

"The knee is the weak part of anatomy in rugby union, rugby league and American football. God did not design men, or women, to play rugby," Garraway added.

"The knee is the weak link in the human body when it comes to contact sport," he added.

In a separate study in the Journal, Andy Turner of Coventry University in England said professional soccer players are prone to joint diseases such as osteoarthritis later in life.

They surveyed 300 former Premier League players to assess their health after they had retired from the sport. Half of the former players had chronic joint problems, mostly in the knee. Nearly a third had had surgery including joint replacement. Anxiety and depression were also common among former players with chronic health problems.

"Results suggest that the long-term impact of playing professional football is considerable, with many respondents requiring medical treatment for injuries after their professional careers had ended," Turner and his colleagues said in the report.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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