Abstract
Objectives
Describe the diagnoses and the time to recovery of running-related injuries in novice runners.
Design
Prospective cohort study on injured runners.
Method
This paper is a secondary data analysis of a 933-person cohort study (DANO-RUN) aimed at characterizing risk factors for injury in novice runners. Among those sustaining running-related injuries, the types of injuries and time to recovery is described in the present paper. All injured runners were diagnosed after a thorough clinical examination and then followed prospectively during their recovery. If they recovered completely from injury, time to recovery of each injury was registered.
Results
A total of 254 runners were injured. The proportion of runners diagnosed with medial tibial stress syndrome was 15%, 10% for patellofemoral pain, 9% for medial meniscal injury, 7% for Achilles tendinopathy and 5% for plantar fasciitis. Among the 220 runners (87%) recovering from their injury, the median time to recovery was 71 days (minimum = 9 days, maximum = 617 days).
Conclusions
Medial tibial stress syndrome was the most common injury followed by patellofemoral pain, medial meniscal injury and Achilles tendinopathy. Half of the injured runners were unable to run 2×500 meters without pain after 10 weeks. Almost 5% of the injured runners received surgical treatment.
Citation: Nielsen RO, Rønnow L, Rasmussen S, Lind M (2014) A Prospective Study on Time to Recovery in 254 Injured Novice Runners. PLoS ONE 9(6):
e99877.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0099877
Editor: Stuart Raleigh, University of Northampton, United Kingdom
Received: March 18, 2014; Accepted: May 20, 2014; Published: June 12, 2014
Copyright: © 2014 Nielsen et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. Mail to: Roen@sport.au.dk.
Funding: The authors have no support or funding to report.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Description
This study analyzes recovery times for injuries in novice runners.