Cheerleading | Is it a sport?

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32. Girls' Most Dangerous Sport: Cheerleading

Girls' Most Dangerous Sport: Cheerleading

For high school girls and college women, cheerleading is far more dangerous than any other sport, according to a new report that adds several previously unreported cases of serious injuries to a growing list.

High school cheerleading accounted for 65.1 percent of all catastrophic sports injuries among high school females over the past 25 years, according to an annual report released Monday by the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research.

The new estimate is up from 55 percent in last year's study. The researches say the true number of cheerleading injuries appears to be higher than they had previously thought. And these are not ankle sprains. The report counts fatal, disabling and serious injuries.

The statistics are equally grim in college, where cheerleading accounted for 66.7 percent of all female sports catastrophic injuries, compared to the past estimate of 59.4 percent.

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Less than catastrophic injuries are vastly more common and they occur at much younger ages, too. Children ages 5 to 18 admitted to hospitals for cheerleading injuries in the United States jumped from 10,900 in 1990 to 22,900 in 2002, according to research published in the journal Pediatrics in 2006. The breakdown:

Strains/sprains: 52.4 percent
Soft tissue injuries: 18.4 percent
Fractures/dislocations: 16.4 percent
Lacerations/avulsions: 3.8 percent
Concussions/closed head injuries: 3.5 percent
Other: 5.5 percent

http://www.livescience.com/2775-girls-dangerous-sport-cheerleading.html

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