Abstract
In professional soccer and other elite sports, medical and performance screening of athletes (also termed periodic health examination or PHE) is common practice. The purposes of this are: (1) to assist in identifying prevalent conditions that may be a threat to safe participation, (2) to assist in setting benchmark targets for rehabilitation or performance purposes and (3) to assist clinicians in determining which athletes may be at risk of future injury and selecting appropriate injury prevention strategies to reduce the perceived risk. However, when using PHE as an injury prevention tool, are clinicians seeking to identify potential causes of injury or to predict future injury? This Current Opinion aims to examine the conceptual differences between aetiology and prediction of injury while relating these areas to the capabilities of PHE in practice. We also introduce the concept of prognosis—a broader approach that is closely related to prediction—and why this may have greater applicability to PHE of professional athletes.
Highlights
A 32-year-old professional football player is sprinting towards the goal
PROGRESS demonstrate the importance of improved prognosis research methods, in particular for large confirmatory studies to identify factors associated with health outcomes; more appropriate statistical analyses to develop and validate models for individual risk of future outcomes; and improved ways to utilise prognosis research information to impact upon individualised treatment or management strategies
This approach is appropriate to Periodic health examination (PHE) in elite sport because any factor, test or measurement performed on players could be statistically analysed to estimate its value as a prognostic factors’ (PFs), both individually and in combination with other factors within a prognostic model
Summary
Periodic health examination (PHE) is commonly used in professional football and other elite sports to provide baseline physical measurements for rehabilitation or performance purposes and to assist in selection of injury prevention practices. PHE is often used to identify possible contributing causal factors for injury. Due to issues with analysis and confounding, this is unachievable. Using PHE for injury risk prediction is theoretically achievable, but we suggest that using the related concept of prognosis is arguably more appropriate for professional athletes
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