Hello, my name is Andrew Roush and I am presenting our project entitled NEISS Trends of Head and Neck Injuries Associated with Lacrosse from 2014 to 2023. This project is being performed by Steve Garris, an intern at the University of Florida, and Andrew Roush and Ryan Enslow, who are students at Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Ivins, Utah. To start off for the context of our project, as an introduction, the NEISS is a database, or namely it is the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, and it's a comprehensive data collection from a national network of hospitals, and it serves as a crucial tool in understanding the scope of injuries in the United States and its territories. Studies have indicated that youth lacrosse has grown from just over 200,000 participants in 2006 to over 440,000 by the year 2018. So there has been an increase in overall youth lacrosse participation over the years. The objective of our study was that we aimed to quantify and depict the trends of head and neck injuries associated with youth lacrosse across the United States by utilizing this NEISS data. The methods by which we collected our data was through this NEISS database. The data was collected for cases logged as head and neck injuries specifically, and we associated with lacrosse during the years 2014 through 2023. However, the years that were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, namely 2020 and 2021, were excluded. This was done to account for the lower bound outliers due to the decreased levels of organized sports nationwide during these years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there really was a stall in most youth sports, so they were excluded. The significance was established at 0.9 for the R2. What the results showed was that the national estimates of head and neck injuries with lacrosse start at just over 5,000 in the year 2014 and decrease to just over 4,000 by the year 2023, as shown here in Table 1. You can see here that we have excluded the years 2020 and 2021. The results demonstrate an overall decreased trend of the projected head and neck injuries associated with lacrosse from 2014 to 2023, with a negative regression slope of negative 313.63 and an R2 of 0.8437 that had a confidence interval of 90%. The national estimates calculated by the NEISS have coefficients of variability that are all below 0.25, as shown in Table 1. The national estimates have a confidence interval of 95%, which ranges from 1,500 to 2,500 people, as shown here, depending on the year. In conclusion, although the R2 was below 0.9, this trend indicates an overall decrease in the head and neck injuries related to lacrosse competition, despite the growth in the sport. A number of factors could explain these findings, including an increased awareness in management protocols for head and neck injuries recently to combat the increase in concussions. Subsequent safer sporting equipment rules or style of play could also contribute to these findings. The limitations of this study include user variability and how the cases were recorded by health care providers and the NEISS staff. Another limitation also includes the lack of COVID-19 affected years and potential factors influencing the years post-COVID-19, years 2022 and 2023. Further investigation is warranted to compare these findings, help determine potential reasons behind these trends, and to prevent head and neck injuries to lacrosse athletes. Thank you for your participation in this and for watching.

youth lacrosse

head and neck injuries

NEISS data

injury decline

player safety