Concerns over UK government plan to increase participation in school rugby
Plan must be informed by injury data, say experts
2015-04-22
(Press-News.org) The UK government plan to fund and to increase participation in rugby in schools has not been informed by injury data, warn experts in The BMJ this week.
Professor Allyson Pollock and colleagues at Queen Mary University of London say the government "should ensure the safety and effectiveness of (school) sports" and call for injury surveillance and prevention programmes to be established to help reduce injury rates.
The high rates of injury in rugby union and rugby league for professional and amateur players, including children, are well established and a cause for medical concern, they explain. For example, around 12% of child and adolescent rugby players sustain an injury severe enough to require at least seven days' absence from playing in a season.
Yet comprehensive injury surveillance systems that capture injuries occurring on the field and in training - across professional and amateur, adult and child, rugby union or rugby league - are lacking in every country except New Zealand.
Studies have found that most rugby injuries occur during the tackle but that scrums are the most dangerous phase of play.
Recent rule changes, such as the introduction of non-contested scrums, may have reduced the number of permanently disabling spinal injuries, but their effectiveness has yet to be properly evaluated, they say. However insufficient attention has been paid to the tackle as the major cause of injury in this collision sport.
They point to programmes such as RugbySmart in New Zealand and BokSmart in South Africa which appear to have had some success in reducing the number of catastrophic injuries through education and behavioural change.
And in England, a new collaboration between the Rugby Football Union and the University of Bath aims to collect injury data from participating schools for under 15s, under 16s and under 18s and to develop new warm-up and training programmes.
The UK government has selected rugby union and rugby league among the five sports it will focus on to increase the prominence of competitive sport in schools in England, say the authors. The government hopes to put 1,300 links in place between schools and rugby union organizations and a further 1,000 with rugby league.
With the exception of New Zealand rugby injury surveillance and prevention programmes established since the late 2000s have not been fully evaluated. Injury rates are high. In the UK effectiveness of prevention programmes, and recent changes to the laws of the game are unknown.
Given that children are more susceptible to injuries such as concussion and often take longer to fully recover, the government's plan is worrying, they warn.
Not enough is being done by the government to put in place injury monitoring and prevention strategies. "Only by collecting injury data and by providing feedback to individuals and organisation working on safety initiatives will the short and long term impact of injury prevention programmes, whether for rugby or any other sport, be known," they conclude.
INFORMATION:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2015-04-22
As the deadline for the millennium development goals approaches, experts writing in The BMJ this week take stock of the successes, failures, and oversights, and look ahead to the next phase - the sustainable development goals.
The millennium development goals are eight aspirational targets set by the United Nations (UN) in New York in September 2000, explain Dr Mark Beattie and colleagues.
The progress made towards some of the goals has been remarkable, they write. For example, child mortality has effectively halved worldwide, from 90 per 1,000 births in 1990 to 46 ...
2015-04-22
WASHINGTON -- Law should be viewed as a major determinant of health and safety and can be utilized as a powerful and innovative tool to address pressing global health concerns, says a newly formed, high-level commission announced today by the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University in partnership with The Lancet.
In their "Comment" published online in The Lancet, the Commission's co-chairs Lawrence O. Gostin and John T. Monahan, along with the Commission's project coordinator, Mary C. DeBartolo, and Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief ...
2015-04-22
Alcohol and drug misuse are responsible for around a third of all deaths in former male prisoners and half in female ex-prisoners, a new study of almost 48000 ex-prisoners published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal has found. Moreover, the research shows that a substantial proportion of these deaths are from preventable causes, including accidents and suicide (42% in men and 70% in women).
Several studies have reported high death rates after release from prison, but few have looked at potential risk factors for these high rates. Led by Seena Fazel, Professor of Forensic ...
2015-04-22
The good relationship between humans and dogs was certainly influenced by domestication. For long, it was assumed that humans preferred particularly tolerant animals for breeding. Thus, cooperative and less aggressive dogs could develop. Recently, however, it was suggested that these qualities were not only specific for human-dog interactions, but characterize also dog-dog interactions. Friederike Range and Zsófia Virányi from the Messerli Research Institute investigated in their study if dogs are in fact less aggressive and more tolerant towards their conspecifics ...
2015-04-22
A team of French clinicians has diagnosed the first case of rabies in that country since 2003. Only 20 cases of human rabies had been diagnosed in France between 1970 and 2003. Moreover, the patient was unaware of having been bitten. So it is not surprising that that diagnosis was not suggested until day 12 post admission to the intensive care unit. The case report appeared April 8 in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology.
"Rabies is nowadays extremely rare in the developed world," said Christian Brun-Buisson, head ...
2015-04-21
DALLAS, April 21, 2014 -- Among black heart failure patients, moderate depression may increase the risk of heart failure patients being hospitalized or dying, according to research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Heart Failure.
Comparing outcomes of 747 blacks to 1,420 whites with heart failure using a patient-reported scale of depressive symptoms, researchers found:
Even moderate depressive symptoms may raise the risk of black heart failure patients being hospitalized or dying.
Blacks with levels of depressive symptoms even below the levels ...
2015-04-21
(MEMPHIS, Tenn. - April 21, 2015) Researchers have identified a protein that offers a new focus for developing targeted therapies to tame the severe inflammation associated with multiple sclerosis (MS), colitis and other autoimmune disorders. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists led the study which appears today in the scientific journal Immunity.
Investigators showed that the protein NLRP12 works in T cells to limit production of chemical messengers or cytokines that fuel inflammation. T cells are specialized white blood cells produced to eliminate specific ...
2015-04-21
The Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has released an updated proposal that will establish an international quality standard for photovoltaic (PV) module manufacturing. The document is intended for immediate use by PV manufacturers when producing modules on an industrial scale so they can increase investor, utility, and consumer confidence in PV system performance.
"Our recent research on 50,000 systems found that, during the time period we studied, just 0.1% of all PV systems were affected by damaged or underperforming modules and less than ...
2015-04-21
A recent randomized trial that looked at the feasibility of 2013 guidelines issued by the American College of Surgeons Trauma Quality Improvement Project for trauma resuscitation found that delivering universal donor plasma to massively hemorrhaging patients can be accomplished consistently and rapidly and without excessive wastage in high volume trauma centers. The plasma is given in addition to red blood cell transfusions to optimize treatment.
The 2013 guidelines recommend that universal donor products be immediately available on arrival of severely injured patients, ...
2015-04-21
Researchers have unraveled the elusive process by which small, highly vascular clusters of sensory cells in the carotid arteries "taste the blood," as a 1926 essay put it--the initial step in regulating blood-oxygen levels.
In the April 21 issue of the journal Science Signaling, a University of Chicago-based research team describes the precise mechanism that cells in the carotid bodies use to detect oxygen levels in the blood as it flows toward the brain. The cells translate that taste test into signals, sent through the carotid sinus nerve, a branch of the glossopharyngeal ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Concerns over UK government plan to increase participation in school rugby
Plan must be informed by injury data, say experts
