Epidemiology of injuries, its frequency and examination of its mechanism during the 4th Men's and Women's Beach Handball World Championship

The aim of this study is to investigate the descriptive and analytic epidemiology of injuries, its frequency and the examination of its mechanism during the 2010 Men's and Women's IV Beach Handball World Championship. This championship lasted 5 days. There were three methods utilised to collect the relevant data including daily injury surveillance form filled in by the physiotherapist or the team doctors on a daily basis, health and observation unit injury forms and lastly, video recording, analysing and its reports but only the method of video recording, analysing and its reports is used as a date collection tool. 240 handball players from 12 women's team and 12 men's team were observed in 112 matches for this study. 76 % of whole tournument in the video recordings and 89 % of the field observation were evaluated on a case-by-case basis. During this scientific study and matches people who are professional in their fields worked according to plan. The games were evaluated in an instant by the match observers. The cameramans recorded the matches. The injuries in the matches were reported by 8 professional observers. The time of the matches and the attendance of the players were selected as the baseline for the data of exposure-risk. Frequency, cross tabulation, descriptive statistics were used for the statistic method of the results and chi square test was also applied for interfactional variation, p-value is significant at the 0.05 level. The result of the study after the video judgement revealed that 19.1 % of the players who are likely to expose injury, 18% of women and 18.8 % of men encountered physical injury during World Championship. It was found that the injury rate of female per match is 1.47(% 95 CI=1.10-1.84), the injury rate of male per match is 1.58 (% 95 CI=1.20-1.96) and total injury rate is 1.53 (% 95 CI=1.27-1.79). It is also discovered that the injury rates in 1000 player matches in total is 191(% 95 CI=158-224), it is 185 (% 95 CI=139-231) for female and it is 198 (% 95 CI=151-245) for male. The rate of 1000 player hours in total is 574 (% 95 CI= 493-655), 554 (% 95 CI=416-692) for female and 594 (% 95 CI=453-735) for male. Accroding to the research, it can be rated that head-face injuries were the most frequent injury and then upper extremity injuries came after. The least exposed part of the body to the injury was torso. While head-face injuries occured during the defence of the game, upper extremities was exposed injury during the attack in the play. It is observed that the number of female players who had RICE intervention and other medical application is higher than male players. Players as a whole, at most, got hurt while staying in contact with the ground. Injuries took place when female players had the ball but on the contrary, male players faced the similar problems while getting the ball. The most of the injuries were faced by female players during the attach and faced by male during the defence of the games. Female players seemed to get injured while attacking artistically. Key Words: Beach handball, Injury epidemiology, Injury frequency, Gender differences.