Men's wrestling poses the highest risk for injury for male college athletes, according to a report outlined in a HealthDay feature published by U.S. News and World Report .
A research team led by Thomas Dompier of the Datalys Center for Sports Injury Research and Prevention in Indianapolis, Ind. looked at data on injuries suffered by male and female NCAA athletes in 25 sports between the 2009-10 and 2013-14 school years. They tabulated 1,053,370 injuries over the five years of the study, for an average of 210,674 injuries per year.
In terms of injury rates, college wrestling leads the way for male athletes, with an overall rate of just over 13 injuries per 1,000 times an athlete engaged in the sport -- what the report referred to as athlete-exposures.
How does wrestling compare to another rough-and-tumble sport? Football accounted for the most injuries overall, at more than 47,000 per year, according to the study. That sport also had the highest rate of injuries during competition, at just less than 40 per 1,000 times per athlete-exposure.
However, when the researchers factored in the relatively low rate of practice-linked injuries for football, the overall injury rate that sport fell to 9.2 per every 1,000 athlete-exposures ... less than the overall jury rate for wrestling.
Among women's sports, gymnastics had the highest overall injury rate (10.4 per 1,000), as well as practice injury rate (10 per 1,000), while soccer had the highest injury rate during competitions (slightly more than 17 per 1,000).
Arguably one of the most surprising results from this study: more injuries occurred during practices than during competition in all sports except men's ice hockey and baseball. Overall, nearly 64 percent of injuries occurred during practices.
The study appears in the Dec. 11 issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report."
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