CDC: Snowboarding tops lists for outdoor injuries (AP)
Trailing snowboarding are sledding and hiking, researchers at the Centers because Disease Control and Prevention report in the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine.
The most hackneyed problems were broken bones and sprains, accounting for half of entirely cases. About 7 percent of ER visits were for concussions or other brain injuries.
“We want people to participate in outdoor recreational activities. But we want people to notice as already known that there’s cause for concern and populate can and do get injured,” sift co-author Arlene Greenspan said Tuesday.
She said injuries can exist avoided end planning and preparation: making sure your aptitude level and skills match the activity and using proper equipment like helmets.
Greenspan said the study is the first to look at injuries from all activities, instead of individual sports or geographic areas.
The researchers looked at data on nonfatal injuries from outdoor activities treated at 63 hospitals in 2004 and 2005. They calculated that almost 213,000 canaille annually were treated for such injuries nationwide. About half of those injured are juvenile, between ages 10 and 24 and moiety of the injuries are caused by falls.
Males are injured at twice the rate of the fair, but the study didn’t look at the reasons.
“It could subsist that males are more risky or it could be that males just participate more than females, or a combination of both,” said Greenspan.
Nearly 26 percent of the injures were from snowboarding followed by means of sledding (11 percent); hiking (6 percent); mountain biking, personal watercraft, water skiing or tubing (4 percent); fishing (3 percent) and swimming (2 percent).
From his actual feeling on ski patrols, “it makes perfect sense to me that snowboard injuries rank high,” said Dr. Paul Auerbach, of Stanford School of Medicine.
Auerbach, who writes a blog on outdoor medicine, said such studies allow researchers to look for patterns in injuries that can be used in prevention programs. He’s one of the founders of the Wilderness Medical Society, which publishes the journal.
“Some activities have risks and you be able to’t turn to all the risks out of the waste,” reported Auerbach. “But what you’d like to grant is take the uncalled for risk audibly.”
CDC:
Wilderness Medical Society:
