Traditionally, most injury surveillance studies used time loss from sport as the primary criterion for defining the occurrence of injury and the duration of time lost as a surrogate measure of injury severity. This approach underestimates the full impact of overuse injuries because athletes with an overuse injury can often continue to train and compete despite persistent injury-associated symptoms and limitations. In 2013, The Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center (OSTRC) Overuse Injury Questionnaire was developed to address challenges which arise when using traditional sports injury surveillance methods to document the epidemiology of overuse injuries.
The OSTRC Overuse Injury Questionnaire contains four domains which seek to evaluate the consequences of overuse injuries on athletes: (1) sports participation, (2) training volume, (3) sports performance and (4) pain. By administering the questionnaire at regular intervals (eg, weekly), clinicians and researchers are able to monitor how the consequences of overuse injury change over time.
Due to a successful uptake, user groups from a range of research and clinical environments gained experience using the OSTRC questionnaires and identified several issues requiring consideration. To address these issues, which ranged from wording clarification to data analysis principles, the original developers of the questionnaire initiated a review process in that included consulting with an international panel of researchers and clinicians who represented key user groups. The process included a review panel meeting. This paper, we summarise the topics discussed during the meeting and introduce several changes to the wording, structure and logic of the original questionnaires. We also analyse new and previously collected data to illustrate the impact of the changes.
This paper also presents the updated versions of the questionnaires (OSTRC-O2 and OSTRC-H2), assess the likely impact of the updates on future data collection and discuss practical issues related to application of the questionnaires. We believe this update will improve respondent adherence and improve the quality of collected data.
The full paper can be accessed here (open access)
Clarsen B, Bahr R, Myklebust G, et al. Improved reporting of overuse injuries and health problems in sport: an update of the Oslo Sport Trauma Research Center questionnaires. British Journal of Sports Medicine 2020;54:390-396.