Poster 390: Combat Sports Related Upper Extremity Injuries Presenting to Emergency Departments in the United States: A NEISS Database Study

Objectives: Combat sports continue to be a popular form of recreation within the United States. With this continually increasing popularity and participation comes an increase in associated injuries as well. Despite this, there remains a paucity of studies characterizing injury patterns, types, and anatomic distributions of injuries sustained during participation in combat sports, thus necessitating further investigation. The goal of this study is to provide an updated description of injuries within combat sports, specifically to the upper extremity and presenting to US emergency departments (EDs). It is our hope that this information may be utilized by participants and trainers to help develop preventative strategies, as well as by health care professionals to diagnose patients and provide the appropriate treatment more readily and accurately. Methods: A retrospective analysis was performed utilizing data from the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission’s (CPSC) National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) between 2003 and 2022. Data were limited to product codes 1200 (unclassified sports or recreational activity), 1207 (boxing), 1270 (wrestling), and 3257 (martial arts). The year designation variable was added to each year’s remaining dataset, and all years were concatenated into a single compiled dataset containing 84,812 observations. Beginning in 2019, the NEISS database updated their gender designations to include sexes which were unidentified or non-binary. Designations of unidentified or nonbinary genders were removed from the dataset, reducing the sample size to 84,807 observations. Data were then filtered to include only injuries of the upper extremity, reducing sample size to 29,364. Anatomic regions of interest included shoulder, upper arm, elbow, forearm, wrist, hand, and fingers. Narratives were reviewed to remove unclassified injuries that did not describe a combat sport of any type, injuries where the reference was to a different primary cause, or terminology overlap. For example, boxing injuries occurring from punching bag arcade games were excluded. Finally, several diagnoses were excluded, such as contusion, crushing injuries, dermatitis, puncture wounds, hematomas, hemorrhages, and other/not stated. Diagnoses of interest included dislocations, fractures, and strains/sprains. The final sample size was 12,642. Injury rates for specific injury types and upper extremity subregions were described as percentages of total in