Daily, weekly and annual patterns in children’s accidental sport injuries*

ABSTRACT

Details of serious injuries to children ≤16 yrs. of age that necessitated urgent surgical intervention by the Department of Pediatric Surgery of the University Hospital of Lausanne, Switzerland were recorded into a database registry. Some 15 110 entries listed the precise time of injury, and 3114 (20.6%) of these resulted from participating in sport-associated activities. Time-of-day, day-of-week and month-of-year differences in the total number of children’s accidental sport injuries (CASI) were validated. Time-of-day patterns were substantiated for “All Sports”, for both boys and girls 5–16 yrs. of age, with more boys than girls experiencing incidents at almost every clock hour. Moreover, they were substantiated for this age group for each of the six different considered individual and team CASI categories – Physical Exercises at School; Bicycle Riding; Roller Skating and Skateboarding; Snow Skiing, Sledding, and Tobogganing; Soccer; and Basketball – for which sample sizes were sufficiently large (n > 230) to perform statistical assessment by ANOVA, t-test and/or cosinor analyses. CASI happened primarily between 06:00 and 17:00 h and rarely evening or overnight. Features – specific clock-time and number of peaks and troughs – of the CASI daily curve pattern of the individual six sport categories differed somewhat; nonetheless, excess or greatest number of CASI typically happened between 12:00 and 14:00 h, even when summertime and other scheduled school and family vacation periods were taken into account. Time-of-day and day-of-week patterns in the boy/girl sex ratio were also validated, with midday and Friday/Saturday peaks, respectively. We hypothesize the prominent 24 h patterns of CASI of 5–16 yr. olds, in particular, are representative of a combination of several determinants. These include exogenous periodic and cyclic environmental and sociocultural phenomena, genetic sex-related traits, plus endogenous circadian cognitive and physiologic rhythms, with the common midday injury excess of many sport categories, at least in part, the consequence of the well-documented midday dip in attention and vigilance of children.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• adolescents
• sport injuries
• 24-hour
• weekly
• annual patterns
• gender
• boys
• girls
• circadian rhythm

Acknowledgements

We express our gratitude to the late Israel Ashkenazi (University of Tel Aviv) and also Benoît Mauvieux (University of Caen), René Clarisse and Nadine Le Floch’ (University of Tours) for stimulating discussions regarding the data presented here. Thank you also to Linda Sackett-Lundeen (University of Minnesota) for assistance in editing and submitting this manuscript. This study was supported by the Thérèse Tremel-Pontremoli donation for research in Chronobiology at the Adolphe de Rothschild Foundation (Paris, France).

Declaration of interest

The content of this review article represents the collective contributions of the listed authors. None of the authors has commercial interests of any kind to declare that are of relevance to the contents of the article. This study was supported by the Thérèse Tremel-Pontremoli donation for research in Chronobiology at the Adolphe de Rothschild Foundation (Paris, France).