Health status of university football athletes through multidimensional screening

ABSTRACT

Objective

Adequate conditioning results from various physical, environmental, and psychological factors in sports activities. In this study, we aimed to clarify the concurrence and relevance of injuries, psychological problems, and sleep disturbance in university football (soccer) players. Biomechanical characteristics and risk factors for those injuries were also investigated.

Methods

Overall, 1,084 university football players participated in this cross-sectional study using a web-based health history questionnaire. Assessments were made via the presence of injuries for physical problems, the Athlete Psychological Strain Questionnaire (APSQ) for psychological problems, and the Athlete Sleep Screening Questionnaire (ASSQ) for sleep difficulties.

Results

There were 200 (19%) athletes with injuries; 413 (38%) of these were APSQ-positive, 246 (23%) were ASSQ-positive, and 468 (43%) athletes had no physical, psychological, or sleep problems. APSQ-positive respondents were significantly more likely to have a current injury than those who were APSQ-negative. No significant difference was observed between the number of ASSQ-positive and -negative respondents and current injuries. Those with sleep problems were significantly more likely to have psychological problems.

Conclusion

More than 60% of university football players had one or more physical, psychological, or sleep problems. Players may have co-occurring problems, and it is important to address them for these athletes to reach peak performance.

KEYWORDS:

• sports injury
• physical problem
• psychological problem
• sleep problem
• multi-dimensional evaluation
• co-occurrence
• mental health literacy
• sleep health literacy
• injury and illness surveillance

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the university football clubs for participating in this study and all the staff of each club for their support in sharing the survey with their members. We would like to thank Editage (www.editage.com) for English language editing.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Data availability statement

Data cannot be shared publicly because of ethical restrictions. Publishing data sets are not covered by the informed consent provided by the study participants, which was approved by the ethics committee of the Teikyo Heisei University Ethical Committee. The data are not owned by a third party. Non-author contact information for the body imposing the restrictions upon the data, to which data access requests can be sent, is the Teikyo Heisei University Ethical Committee ([email protected]).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI under Grant Number JP 21K11470. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or manuscript preparation. The foundation did not provide support for the salaries of all authors.