A study which was recently carried out in a Vermont ski resort has shown that snowboarders get injured slightly more often than skiers, with the most injuries happening in young, inexperienced female snowboarders.
12,000 injuries counted
According to Reuters.com , the types of injuries sustained on the slopes also varies depending on which sport you do. Snowboarders are more likely to be taken out by a hurt wrist or shoulder, and skiers more commonly injuring a knee ligament.
During 18 winter seasons with 4.6 million visitors, researchers counted a total of close to 12,000 injuries severe enough to bring skiers and snowboarders to the resort clinic.
For the new study, Dr. Robert Johnson from the University of Vermont College of Medicine in Burlington and colleagues analyzed injury reports from Sugarbush Resort in Warren, Vermont, from 1988 through 2006.
Seventeen percent of the resort’s visitors during that time were snowboarders who made up 19 percent of its injuries. The research team also reported that, since 2001, the injury rates have been consistently higher in snowboarders than skiers.
On average, those skiers and snowboarders who did sustain injuries were younger and less experienced than a group of uninjured athletes who were surveyed for comparison.
Dr. David Salonen, a radiologist who has studied ski injuries at Toronto Western Hospital, but was not involved in the recent study spoke to Reuters Health saying: "If you've got a whole bunch of people that are young and trying to learn how to do something that is like an extreme sport, there's going to be a higher incidence of injury.
"In any sport -- and skiing and snowboarding is one of them -- there are areas that will be more threatening and challenging to the athlete but also more intriguing. As you're younger in age, you have a tendency to want to push your limits greater in any sport."
Johnson's team did not find that injuries were more common in athletes who used so-called terrain parks at the resort, which include half-pipes and jumps, even though researchers had been afraid that would be the case when they were installed.
One in five of all snowboarding injuries in adults and close to two in five in kids were wrist sprains and breaks, which are generally the result of a fall forward on to the snow, according to Salonen. Fractured collar bones and concussions each accounted for about four percent of the injuries in adults and five percent in kid snowboarders.
Among skiers, on the other hand, torn and otherwise injured knee ligaments sidelined one-third of the adult skiers, with leg muscle bruises being most common in kids, Johnson and his colleagues reported in the American Journal of Sports Medicine.
