Advancing overuse injury monitoring: A new validated tool for non-contact sports

Objectives: Sports are basically classified into three types: contact sports, non-contact sports, and collision sports. Repetitive microtrauma leading to subclinical injuries constitutes a major chunk of injuries in non-contact sports. The objective of this study was to develop and validate an overuse injury questionnaire, termed the SGPGI non-contact sports overuse injury questionnaire (SNOI-Q), which would be easy to understand and athlete-friendly to use for the detection of overuse injuries among non-contact sportspersons. Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional study to develop and validate the SNOI-Q. We endeavored to obtain a healthy sample size of 122 participants in our study. To ascertain convergent validity, the McNemar’s test was used to determine the differences in prevalence of overuse injury as identified by SNOI-Q and Oslo Sports Trauma Research Centre Overuse Injury Questionnaire (OSTRC-O2) among participants. The correlation between severity scores produced by SGPGI non-contact sports overuse injury questionnaire (SNOI-Q) and OSTRC-O2 was determined using Spearman’s correlation. Internal consistency reliability estimation was used to assess the reliability of SNOI-Q in identifying the prevalence of the overuse problem among participants. Results: Additional screening questions were added at the start of the SNOI-Q questionnaire. In SNOI-Q, quantitative and more specific options and a Visual Analog Scale (out of a maximum score of 10) were used for more accuracy, and “gatekeeper” questions were added. The SNOI-Q method detected a prevalence of 32.79%. The categorical agreement analysis using Cohen’s Kappa produced a coefficient of 0.740 with an observed agreement of 84.2%. Both intraclass correlation coefficient values obtained in this analysis fall into the excellent reliability category, well exceeding the 0.90 threshold. Conclusion: The study’s main achievement was the successful development and validation of SNOI-Q, specifically designed for non-contact sports athletes. The questionnaire can facilitate better injury prevention strategies and monitoring programs for non-contact sport athletes in future applications.