Abstract des Autors

Full-contact taekwondo was recently recognized by the IOC as a regular Olympic sport. In the absence of scientific data, the purpose of this study was to investigate the location, type, situation and mechanism of head and neck injuries in elite taekwondo athletes competing at several national championships and team trials. The Mann-Whitney U test was used to determine the difference in total head and neck injury rate per 1,000 athlete-exposures between men and women as well as in head and neck time-loss injuries. No significant difference (p>0.05) between male and female taekwondo athletes was found in total head and neck injury rate (28.76/1,000 athlete-exposure versus 27.27/1,000 athlete-exposures for the men and women, respectively). No difference (p>0.05) was found between men and women in total time-loss head and neck injury rate. The head was the body part incurring most of the time-loss injuries in the males. Verf.-Referat