Research

Can a football player return-to-play after surgery to reconstruct a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL)? Is it possible to return and advance to the next level of competition? If not, why not? These are the questions Dr. Kirk A. McCullough and his colleagues from Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee addressed in this study.They conducted a retrospective study of 157 football athletes to find out some answers. A retrospective study means they studied the players after th...

If you are any kind of football fan, you've probably heard the term stinger. Simply put, a stinger is an injury to a nerve in the neck. It's a common injury among players involved in contact sports. Getting hit on the head from one side is usually enough to do it. A cervical nerve (coming from the spinal cord to the arm in the neck) gets stretched or pinched.Burning pain down the arm after getting hit is the main symptom. There may be additional symptoms of arm weakness and numbness. The symptom...

There are an estimated 600,000 to 1.2 million football-related injuries per year among young adults in North America. If the injuries are severe enough, they can put athletic careers in peril, limiting the athletes' ability to follow their dreams. Much attention has been placed on injuries of the leg, such as the knee and ankle, but upper extremity injuries (hand and arm) appear to be much more common than any other type of injury, including concussions. Up to 30 percent of injuries involve the ...

According to studies from the 1970s, every year in North America, there are between 600,000 and 1.2 million injuries in high school and college football. About 30 percent of these injuries affect the hands or arm of the player. Unfortunately, there have been no large studies done since the 1970s, so the current number of injuries was unknown. Because professional football players have better access to training facilities, are more experienced, and are stronger and faster, it would make sense tha...