Introduction and purpose

The epidemiological study of sports injuries is essential to assess their causes and consequences on the athlete. The Orchard Sports Injury Classification System (OSICS) model was chosen to determine its usefulness to manage and evaluate sports injury epidemiology, using as a handy reference, the medical care offered to the Taekwondo national athletes team who resided in the Olympic Training Centre of Sant Cugat del Valles for two Olympic cycles.

Methods

There are encoded in OSICS All medical care given to Taekwondo athletes from 1st January 1997 to 31th December 2004 were encoded in OSICS, in order to count the number of episodes and visits generated. This medical care was according to gender, anatomic location of the damaged structure, and type of injury.

Results

With the OSICS system it was easy to obtain the following information: a total of 3969 visits were made which corresponded to 2912 episodes, representing an average of 1.36 visits per episode. Of these 30.0% corresponded to medical pathology and 69.5% to sports injuries. The most affected anatomical location was the lower limbs, the knee being the structure that generated the largest number of episodes and visits. Episodes of wounds and bruises are the most recorded, and overuse injuries were the ones that generated more visits per episode.

Conclusions

The encoding method used, is practical and effective to assess the epidemiological pathology in sport. Also by determining the prevalence of injuries in Taekwondo, it would be useful for developing preventive plans.