Injuries affecting the shoulder, a joint with greater mobility than any other joint in the body, account for between 8% and 13% of sports injuries today. This type of ailment has been progressively increasing in recent years, coinciding with the growing interest in physical exercise and sport at amateur level.
What could be the causes?
The mechanisms of production of these shoulder injuries in athletes are due to traumatic causes, direct blows or falls on the arm or overuse, mainly in throwing sports (racket sports such as tennis and paddle tennis, handball, swimming …). These mechanisms can affect both professional and amateur athletes in the same way.
The practice carried out, determinant
Shoulder injuries are closely related to the type of sport played. There are two main groups of injuries: throwing shoulder injuries, which affect those who throw overhead (baseball, volleyball, tennis,…), and swimming shoulder injuries, which are specific to swimmers as the name suggests. To minimize the risk of injury as much as possible, active exercise patterns should be customized to strengthen the weakest structures.
One of the most frequent pathologies affecting the athlete’s shoulder is instability with unidirectional, bidirectional or multidirectional glenohumeral dislocations or subluxations, as well as microinstabilities due to repetitive overuse.
Arthroscopic surgery, the most common
When injuries cannot improve in spite of a correct medical and rehabilitative program, they become surgical, although there are others that are already surgical from the outset. Surgery aims to restore and repair the injured structures by returning them to their pre-injury state. Minimally invasive surgery by arthroscopy is the most common, and allows direct visualization of all the structures of the shoulder, being able to reproduce gestures and movements of the athlete during surgery. This technique has resulted in a great advance in the interpretation and diagnosis of shoulder pathology, in addition to reducing healing time and speeding up the return to sporting activity.