Abstract
Football is the most widespread sport in the world, and its number of participants is increasing. Therefore, football injuries are frequent in the field of sport medicine. Initially, clinicians and scientists have focused on the study of injury treatment; however, despite a better comprehension of the physiopathology of sport injury, the impact of few scientific findings on injury rate is limited. Therefore, it has become clear that preventing injuries may be the main way to decrease the absence of the athlete from the competitions. For this reason, in the last decades, scientific research has started focusing on football injury epidemiology, both at professional and amateur levels, with the final aim of implementing programmes of prevention. Incidence and patterns of football injuries have been described, and several intrinsic and extrinsic risk factors have been identified. This allowed the implementation of specific prevention programmes, with good results in some cases. However, many risk factors are still controversial and deserve further investigation, with the final aim of reducing an injury rate that is still high.
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Volpi, P., Eirale, C., Bisciotti, G.N. (2016). Football: Epidemiology and Injury Mechanism. In: Volpi, P. (eds) Arthroscopy and Sport Injuries. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14815-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14815-1_6
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