The goal of this seed grant project is to expand our current understanding of college football-related injuries, its causes and opportunities for prevention informed by paradigms drawn from a range of disciplines, including epidemiology, biostatistics, biomechanics, ergonomics and the behavioral and social sciences. Through collaboration with the Syracuse University Football Department, this project will create research databases that will facilitate an examination of epidemiologic associations involving various physiological and socio-behavioral factors and football related injuries.
Existing literature suggests that football-related injuries follow acute events and are considered to be relatively sudden in onset. As a consequence, it is tempting to focus on the impact of short-term influences such as physiological and anthropometric characteristics of players in a bid to design injury prevention strategies. While such factors are undeniably important, risk of injury does not preclude the influence of socio-behavioral factors including depression and stress. Indeed, there are a host of distal factors that influence these domains, not all of which are inherently obvious and therefore are currently not considered amenable to intervention.
Compared to existing injury models, the retrospective cohort study design proposed in this project will explicitly extend the temporal dimension of the “pre-event” phase of the commonly used explanatory injury matrix proposed by Haddon (1970) to include distal socio-behavioral factors. An analytical approach that views these risk factors as having potentially different effects (both mediation and moderation) at distinct critical periods over the full-time span of a player’s college experience (i.e. four or more years) will be examined. This approach to the conceptualization of football-related injuries will be used to define the nature and magnitude of the injury problems, establish causal models that link risk factors, protective factors, and injury experience. Project findings will be used to lay the foundational premise for pilot testing preventive strategies linked to modifiable factors with intervention potential as a means to reduce injury risk while promoting optimal player performance.