Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the present study was to describe the incidence proportion of different types of running-related injuries (RRI) among recreational runners and to determine their time to recovery.
Methods
A sub-analysis of the injured runners included in the 839-person, 24-week randomized trial named Run Clever. During follow-up, the participants reported levels of pain in different anatomical areas on a weekly basis. In case injured, runners attended a clinical examination at a physiotherapist, who provided a diagnosis, e.g., medial tibial stress syndrome (MTSS), Achilles tendinopathy (AT), patellofemoral pain (PFP), iliotibial band syndrome (ITBS) and plantar fasciopathy (PF). The diagnose-specific injury proportions (IP) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated using descriptive statistics. The time to recovery was defined as the time from the first registration of pain until total pain relief in the same anatomical area. It was reported as medians and interquartile range (IQR) if possible.
Results
A total of 140 runners were injured at least once leading to a 24-week cumulative injury proportion of 32% [95% CI: 26%; 37%]. The diagnoses with the highest incidence proportion were MTSS (IP = 16% [95% CI: 9.3%; 22.9%], AT (IP = 8.9% [95% CI: 3.6%; 14.2%], PFP (IP = 8% [95% CI: 3.0%; 13.1%]. The median time to recovery for all types of injuries was 56 days (IQR = 70 days). Diagnose-specific time-to-recoveries included 70 days (IQR = 89 days) for MTSS, 56 days (IQR = 165 days) for AT, 49 days (IQR = 63 days) for PFP.
Conclusion
The most common running injuries among recreational runners were MTSS followed by AT, PFP, ITBS and PF. In total, 77 injured participants recovered their RRI and the median time to recovery for all types of injuries was 56 days and MTSS was the diagnosis with the longest median time to recovery, 70 days.
Citation: Mulvad B, Nielsen RO, Lind M, Ramskov D (2018) Diagnoses and time to recovery among injured recreational runners in the RUN CLEVER trial. PLoS ONE 13(10):
e0204742.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0204742
Editor: Manoj Srinivasan, The Ohio State University, UNITED STATES
Received: December 11, 2017; Accepted: September 13, 2018; Published: October 12, 2018
Copyright: © 2018 Mulvad 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: Data are from the RUN CLEVER study whose authors may be contacted at DAR@ucn.dk and relevant data from the injured participants can be found in the supplementary files.
Funding: The Danish Rheumatism Association (https://www.gigtforeningen.dk/) provided a DKK 75.000 grant for this study. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.