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It is heartening to see that the field of surfing medicine is sufficiently mature that not just one, but two reviews of the existing literature have recently been published. The reviews, both involving researchers at Bond University, Gold Coast, Australia cover acute surfing injuries and overuse/chronic surfing injuries. Here, in an extreme example of surfing medicine nerdiness, we review the first of those two review papers.
McArthur and her colleagues do a very good job at explaining the systematic methodology behind an exhaustive literature search, which is eventually culled down to 19 higher-quality relevant studies, which are then categorized by strength of evidence, study design, and demographics. The paper Epidemiology of Acute Injuries in Surfing: Type, Location, Mechanism, Severity, and Incidence: A Systematic Review (PDF), then goes on to examine the injury-rates across studies as well a breakdown of injury type, location and mechanism. The authors also compare hospital-based data to that from survey-based studies and find that head/neck/face injuries were more common among hospital-based studies than among survey-based studies.
Overall, this review article does a good job at compiling available data on acute surfing injuries from 19 different studies in several very legible figures. However, due to significant variability between how different studies classified injury type, location, and mechanism, some classifications seemed forced. For example, contusions and hematomas were classified as skin injuries and not soft tissue injuries. Also, some of the citations cited the correct author, but the wrong paper.
Ed.
