Spinal cord injury in Rugby Union players

BMJ 1995;311:511 (19 August)

Letters

Spinal cord injury in Rugby Union players

EDITOR,--Timothy Noakes and Ismail Jakoet are right in sayingthat there are no reliable figures for the number of spinalcord injuries sustained by rugby players.¹ The Duke of CornwallSpinal Injuries Centre states that 16% of all spinal injuriesresult from sporting activities, with 2.5% being due to rugby.²

For the past 15 months I have been working as a volunteer forthe Trevor Jones Tetraplegic Trust, set up to help people completelyparalysed as a result of sports injuries. The trust has thenames of 140 people disabled in this way, and I have analyseddetails on 98 of these from the registration forms filled inby the patients or, occasionally, a relative. Fifty two of theinjuries occurred while the person was playing Rugby Union football:four in the 1970s, 28 in the '80s, and 12 in the '90s. The figuresare nowhere near complete: the '90s . . . [Full text of this article]

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