Overuse injuries in sport: development, validation and application of a new surveillance method

Introduction: Overuse injuries, defined as those without a specific, identifiable event responsible for their occurrence, may be a substantial problem in many sports. However, current surveillance methods in sports injury epidemiology studies, which rely heavily on time loss for injury definitions and severity measurement, may underestimate their true impact. This is because athletes often continue to participate in sport despite the existence of overuse injuries. The main aim of this dissertation was to develop a new method to record overuse injuries in sport, and to establish its validity by applying it in a number of different research settings