Sports Injuries

Commiserations to any of you out there who've injured yourselves playing sports. We mean, we never imagined that a strained rotator cuff or torn anterior cruciate ligament could be anything less than ex-cruciate-ing. But we had no idea just how bad it could be until we read a survey of 236 injured people conducted by a sports medicine Web site, http://www1.SxSportsMed.com. Here's what survey respondents said about their post-injury lives. * 71% helped their kids less with homework.

Those macho football players, so the stereotype goes, are the most likely high school athletes to land on the injured list. Not so, says a Seattle physician who has been studying high school athletic injuries since 1979. At highest risk? The girls' cross-country team, says Dr. Stephen Rice, director of the Athletic Health Care System, a high school sports-injury-prevention and management program at the University of Washington, Seattle. (Football players are in second place.

The headbanging collisions that thrill sports fans have lifelong effects on the athletes, with impairments in movement and thinking skills showing up 30 years or more after the concussions, researchers reported Tuesday. The slight deficits resulting from one or two concussions were similar to problems found in patients with the early stages of dementia, although they did not interfere with the daily life of the otherwise healthy men, researchers reported in the journal Brain.

Actress Jane Fonda, about to release a new videotape on how to prevent minor sports injuries, got some firsthand experience on the subject when she fell off her bicycle and separated a shoulder. Fonda was injured Wednesday morning when she fell during an early morning ride along Pacific Coast Highway near her home in Santa Monica, said her publicist, Steve Rivers.

Broken bones and strained muscles may worry athletes but the more common sports injuries are skin problems such as "black heel," "bikini bottom," "jogger's nipples" and "runner's rump," a physician reports. Dr. Rodney S. W. Basler, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and a specialist in sports medicine, said the skin "bears the brunt of the punishment" from vigorous exercise and can develop injuries in unexpected ways.

WHEN Alicia Di Rado Dingsdale tore her hip flexor muscle in a soccer game in 2004, she was determined not to let it hold her back. A week later she ran a 5-kilometer race in Arcadia. "By the time I finished I was crawling," she says. She did physical therapy for a few months and eased back into running -- but not slowly enough. "I had missed running so much I started doing too much," says the 36-year-old.

It even sounds painful: helmet cracking against helmet, linemen grunting, the thud of bodies landing in a pile. But that doesn't mean Junior should be locked in the library if he comes home with a football helmet. A student-athlete is about as likely to sustain a serious injury in wrestling as in football, and more likely in gymnastics. And parents can play an important role in preventing many sports-related injuries.

Sooner or later, almost everyone gets sidelined by an injury that keeps them from being physically active. Twisted ankles, tendinitis, pulled muscles and the more serious torn shoulder rotator cuffs used to mean weeks of inactivity and, with it, unwanted pounds that only complicated recovery. These days, "we approach injury much like we would with any athlete," says physical therapist Thomas Papke, a spokesman for the American Physical Therapy Assn.

From wrestling to ice hockey to baseball, there are very few sports left in which women have not stepped up to participate, either competitively or recreationally. Major health benefits are accrued in women who participate in regular physical activity.

About the Project This is the result of six months of research and reporting by Tribune Auto Race Writer Ed Hinton, with help from staffers at other Tribune papers, among them Darin Esper of the Los Angeles Times. It sheds new light on the decline of traditional fatalism among race drivers and the need for more research and action to prevent the violent deaths the sport has come to accept.