In soccer, exercise-based prevention programs are effective at reducing the number of non-contact injuries, according to a new study.
In “Do exercise-based prevention programmes reduce non-contact musculoskeletal injuries in football (soccer)? A systematic review and meta-analysis with 13, 355 athletes and more than 1 million exposure hours,” published on May 17, 2021 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the researchers conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials on exercise-based prevention programs.
“The aim of this systematic review was to investigate the effect of exercise-based programs in the prevention of non-contact musculoskeletal injuries among football players in comparison to a control group,” they wrote.
Ten original randomized controlled trials with 13,355 soccer players were identified through a search of MEDLINE, EMBASE, CENTRAL, CINAHL, PEDro and SPORTDiscus databases through January 2021.
Studies were eligible for the review if they included football players aged 13 years or older. Exercise-based programs were used as the intervention and the number of non-contact musculoskeletal injuries were reported as well as the exposure hours for each arm of the trial. A non-contact injury was defined as any acute sudden onset musculoskeletal injury that occurred without any physical contact.
All the trials must also have a control group. Risk for bias for each study and overall quality of evidence for the meta-analysis were also calculated.
Overall, there were 1,062,711 hours of exposure. The pooled injury risk ratio showed that exercise-based prevention programs reduced the risk of non-contact injuries by 23% [0.77 (95% CI 0.61 to 0.97) compared with the control group, but the evidence was rated as low-quality.
“Exercise-based prevention programs may reduce the risk of non-contact musculoskeletal injuries by 23% among football players. Future high quality trials are still needed to clarify the role of exercise-based programs in preventing non-contact musculoskeletal injuries among football players,” the researchers wrote.
