Predicting Injury: Challenges in Prospective Injury Risk Factor Identification
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Published on: May 18, 2015
Daniel R Clifton1, Dustin R Grooms2,3, Jay Hertel4
1School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, The Ohio State University, Columbus.
Context:
Musculoskeletal injury-prediction methods vary and may have limitations that affect the accuracy of results and clinical meaningfulness.
Background:
Research examining injury risk factors is meaningful, but attempting to extrapolate injury risk from studies that do not prospectively assess injury occurrence may limit clinical applications. Injury incidence is a vital outcome measure, which allows for the appropriate interpretation of injury-prediction analyses; a lack of injury-incidence data may decrease the accuracy and increase the uncertainty of injury-risk estimates. Extrapolating results that predict an injury risk factor to predicting actual injuries may lead to inappropriate clinical decision-making models.
Conclusions:
Improved understanding of the limitations of injury-prediction methods, specifically those that do not prospectively assess injuries, will allow clinicians to better assess the clinical meaningfulness of the results.
