Epidemiology of Sports Injuries of Iran’s Elite Male Tennis Players A Retrospective Study

Tennis is one of the most popular sports in the world, which has its own unique types of injuries due to the unlimited time of competitions and the nature of this sport. The aim of this study was to evaluate the epidemiology of tennis injuries in the elite men of the country retrospectively.

The present study was a descriptive and retrospective study and elite male tennis players ranked in 1 to 300 countries were studied in this study. Athletes who reported injuries in the 2019 year were selected as research samples.The collected information was completed through the injury registration form by the athlete and with the help of the researcher. To analyze the data from SPSS software version 22 and using descriptive statistics, Chi-square (2X) to examine the differences in the levels of variables (3 levels and above) and the Prop test to examine the differences in the two-level variable at the level of Significance 0.05 was used.

Injury rate (195 injuries) per 1000 hours of training was 6.04. The results showed that the anatomical region of the elbow was the most injured (21%), the rupture / inflammation of the tendon (34.3%) was the most common type of injury and among these 117 cases (60.3%) the injury was related to Overuse. The most common mechanism of injury was forehand motion (20.9%) and most of the severity of injuries was moderate (22.3%). Also, the highest rate of injury occurred in the end area (71%) and during training (63%) while working with the ball (78.8%).

According to the findings, which indicate the high prevalence of injury in tennis, the medical staff of teams, coaches, and athletes are advised to take the necessary measures to prevent them, taking into account the potential risk factors associated with the occurrence of injury.