First overview on chronic injuries in sport climbing: proposal for a change in reporting of injuries in climbing

BACKGROUND: Climbing as a youth sport is growing fast. This is mostly due to indoor walls for training attracting youngsters. With hard training from young ages it is vital to be able to pinpoint training regimes to avoid injuries in athletes. Furthermore, it is vital to know what injuries are most common in the sport to be able to prevent them. Such an overview on injuries does not exist to date. The aim of this overview is to summon the injuries described in published research and to extract the most common. METHOD: Two literature searches were conducted in PubMed, on 11 August 2013 and 19 August 2015. RESULT: The searches gave 1409 titles. All titles were carefully examined for the possible finding of descriptions of climbing-related chronic injuries. This led to the reading of 96 abstracts and then to a final inclusion of 47 papers of which 17 described chronic climbing-related injuries. We found descriptions of 45 chronic injuries in those 17 papers. DISCUSSION: Owing to methodological differences, lack of reporting strategies and non-use of control groups in the included papers, it is not possible to conclude on which groups of climbers are more prone to injuries or to state which injuries are the most prevalent among climbers.