Study Says Girls’ Soccer Injures on Rise

Soccer injuries among girls are on the increase while boys’ injuries are twice as likely to be more severe, a study says.

Those were among the findings in the first comprehensive U.S. study of pediatric soccer injuries, published Thursday in The American Journal of Sports Medicine.

Key author R. Dawn Comstock of Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, says ready-made explanations are the facts that more girls than ever are playing soccer and boys usually are far more aggressive, USA Today says.

And it’s gaining in popularity, she says, with the number of participants almost doubling during the period of 1990-2003 from about 305,000 to nearly 659,000.

Comstock and her colleagues culled through medical records of 100 hospital emergency rooms and found 1.6 million soccer injuries ended up in emergency rooms among players ages 2 to 18. Some 1.9 percent of the injured boys were admitted to a hospital compared to 1 percent for girls.