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Breast injuries in contact sports needs to catch up, particularly as more women and girls play.
The popularity of women’s rugby and Australian rules football has soared in Australia in recent years. But new research suggests the management of breast injuries for athletes in these contact sports needs to catch up, particularly as more women and girls enter the game. When PhD candidate Brooke Brisbine took to the road, visiting over 30 training sessions across Victoria, NSW, the ACT and Queensland, she surprised a lot of the female athletes and staff.
“It was quite nearly the first time that any of these players had ever been asked about a breast injury,” Brisbine says. “And certainly the first time a vast majority of them had ever said anything about it at all.”
In person and online, working with the University of Wollongong and Australian Institute of Sport, Brisbine surveyed almost 300 athletes and close to 250 coaching and medical staff to investigate the occurrence and perception of breast injuries in women’s AFL, rugby sevens, league and union. Fifty-eight percent of players reported experiencing a contact breast injury during training or a game, and almost half of those, more often sub-elite players, said the injury had affected their performance.
However, coaches and medical staff were often unaware of the problem and underestimated the occurrence of breast injuries for their players. In the study, most staff estimated fewer than 5% of players had sustained such an injury. Brisbine says this is not surprising considering so few players are reporting their breast injuries. “No one’s been asking them about it. No one told them that it’s important to report it,” she says, adding that women playing at the community level represented the bulk of her data.
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