Pre-participation Screening

 

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Purpose

Approximately 46.5 million children and 7.7 million high-school students in the United States participate in organized sports each year (NATA, 2014). As the number of individuals participating in sports continues to increase, so does the number of sport-related injuries. In 2012, over 1.35 million children received emergency care for sports-related injuries (Ferguson, 2013), and 39 young athletes suffered from sports-related death (NATA, 2014). The purpose of pre-participation screening in sports is to decrease the number of sport-related injuries and death by identifying individual abnormalities that may predispose an athlete to injury (Cook, Burton, & Hoogenboom, 2006).
Traditionally, pre-participation screenings consisted of a medical examination and a subjective history to identify potential risk factors for further injury such as cardiovascular conditions, asthma, diabetes, etc. (Casa et al., 2012). The American Heart Association (AHA) provides an outline of appropriate examination components and subjective history questions. Protocols such as the one provided by the AHA ensure consistent and uniform assessments (Mahmood et al., 2013); however, many professionals argue these protocols are not individualized enough to thoroughly analyze injury risk (Casa et al., 2012; Cook, Burton, & Hoogenboom, 2006). In more recent years, professions suggest functional movement assessments be incorporated into pre-participation screens to identify any abnormalities in movement patterns that may predispose to musculoskeletal injuries (Cook, Burton, & Hoogenboom, 2006). In addition, incorporation of neurocognitive and balance assessments, such as the Immediate Post-concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing (ImPACT) and Balance Error Scoring System (BESS), into the pre-participation screening protocol provide a baseline measurement that can be compared to post-injury scores to identify the severity of an injury (Kerr et al., 2015).

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