To our knowledge, no peer-reviewed articles have examined the injury prevalence and prevalence proportion of physically active persons in Denmark on a population level. The present study is therefore novel in the sense that contributes to the overall identification of the extent of the injury problem (Finch, 2006). The data presented in this study also suggest that sports injuries are frequent in Denmark, since a total of 18.4% of the adults and 19.3% of the children reported having had one or more injuries within the past 12 months, equal to either time lost with physical activity and/or contact to the health care system. We found more injuries amongst males than amongst females. The reason for this difference may be due to gender-specific differences in both physical aspects like anatomy but also psychologically aspects as mentality and behaviour when participating in certain sports. In addition, different preferences may exist between gender in the type of preferred physical activity and the exposure time of these activities, which, may be higher in males, which is detectable in the data set, and could be focused in future studies.
The consequences associated with sports-related injuries in Denmark are still largely unknown. For example, information about injury severity and recovery, potential absenteeism of work, use of therapeutic or surgical interventions, or time before returning to play (which may be equal to absenteeism from the health benefits of physical activity) are needed to understand the full impact from a population-level perspective.
According to Table 1, running was the sport which contributed to the most injuries (ninj = 198) among adults, followed by football (ninj = 94) and strength training (ninj = 89). Accordingly, a reduction in the total number of sports injuries in the adult Danish population would benefit from a focus on preventing injuries sustained when running, playing football and engaging in strength training. Similarly, prevention of injuries in children and adolescents may require increased focus on preventing injuries associated with football (ninj = 235), handball (ninj = 86) and gymnastics (ninj = 66) (Table 2). Importantly, no consequences in terms of absenteeism from work, surgery or time-to-recovery were reported. Therefore, some sports with a low injury prevalence, such as riding (7 injuries reported) amongst adults, may lead to severe injuries, such as spinal cord trauma etc., while the impact of injuries in other sports are less severe. This is not shown in the present data. Consequently, this is a major limitation that limited the possibility for evaluating the consequences of injuries across sports.
Table 3 shows the injury prevalence proportion ratio between age groups amongst active. The injury prevalence proportion continuously decrease from the youngest to the oldest, with only one plateau at 20–29 and 30–39. This observed trend could be explained by behavioural changes over time including changes to activity preference, as well as “the healthy athletes bias/effect” which is based on the rationale that only previously uninjured persons will continue to be active into older age.
The sample of the present study was recruited through CRS. Therefore, the 10.000 adults and 6.500 children and adolescents were representative of the population of Denmark in a number of variables, such as gender, age, education, ethnicity and demography. The response proportion among adults of 35% was lower than similar data collection in 2007 (43%) and 2011 (47%). Although the response proportion of 35% was low, the generalizability to the Danish population is presumably better than other studies examining the epidemiology of injury in specific target-populations such as elite athletes or members of certain sports clubs. However, the results in the present study may be affected by selection- and information bias. Owing to the response proportion of 35.0% amongst adults and 50% amongst children, it is reasonable to question whether the responders differed from the non-responders, (i.e. non-responders are hypothesized to be less active compared with responders). This selection problem was unsuccessfully handled by inviting the non-responders to answer a few questions describing their characteristics, but only 711 (10.9%) responded the phone call and the questions answered described the sub-sample insufficiently.
Amongst children, selection bias was less of a problem because of the higher proportion of persons responding, though the level of activity amongst responders may still be higher than non-responders. In summary, the selection problems addressed above may lead to selection bias amongst both adults and children leading to an overestimation of the proportion being injured in this sample altogether. The proportion of injured amongst active in general or across each sport may, however, be unaffected as it is unreasonable to believe that injury either motivates or prevents answering the questionnaire.
Injury definition
The definition of injury used in the present study is almost similar to the consensus definition for runners, proposed by Yamato et al. (Yamato et al., 2015). It is well known that different injury definitions will find different injury prevalence in the same population. Similar definitions must be used before comparing results produced in epidemiological studies. In the present study, time-loss was used as the first component, since it is commonly used to define injury in many team sports given that it is easier to identify cases of injury (Clarsen & Bahr, 2014) In individual sports, however, it can be difficult to distinguish between reduced, modified, and/or not participating or participating with pain, thus “time-loss” will appear differently between sports and individuals, and 7 days of inhibition may not appear before severe physical complaint is present. Therefore, injury definition, as second component, also comprised a component: “and/or professional health care attention” which classifies a person as injured, irrespective of whether there has been activity time-loss. The use of “time-loss” has the disadvantage that it is very individual-dependent whether to stop training or just modify it. “Medical attention”, on the other hand, is very level-dependent, as people at high level of sports may see physiotherapists regularly to avoid losing valuable training time or important competitions, where less trained persons or beginners may take some time off instead of seeing health care. Thus the use of “and / or” will cover some of this discrepancy and may thereby give a more valid picture of the injury proportions.
Perspective
Translating Research into Injury Prevention Practice (TRIPP) (Finch, 2006) is a framework to enhance prevention of sports-related injuries in a population. Injury surveillance studies must be conducted to identify if sports injuries are a public-health burden. The prevalence of injuries was demonstrated in the present study. Still, the consequences of these injuries require further investigation to fully understand the burden on public health.
The TRIPP framework highlights the importance of determining aetiology and mechanisms of injury. Bittencourt et al. (Bittencourt et al., 2016) promoted that the value of identifying single or multiple risk factors is limited in a prevention-perspective. In contrast, recognition of complex injury pattern as explanation of injury may be a new beneficial analytical approach (Bittencourt et al., 2016). If the injury pattern is recognized, next step is to develop preventive measures and test of the efficacy of the measures, first in ideal conditions, then implemented a in real world as guidelines for athletes and coaches (Soligard et al., 2016). Finally, additional epidemiological studies will be needed frequently to observe a potential effect of preventive interventions and a decline in injury prevalence on population level. Therefore, similar data collection on the prevalence and prevalence proportion of sports injuries in a sample representative of the Danish population will be conducted in the future. The next investigation made by the Danish Institute for Sports Studies will be in 2019/2020.