**Author details**

Cristiano Eirale and Giannicola Bisciotti

Aspetar Hospital, Doha, Qatar

## **References**


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**Chapter 6**

**Conservative Treatment of Muscle Injuries:**

**From Scientific Evidence to Clinical Practice**

The musculoskeletal injuries, both acute and chronic, are very common in sport activities accounting from 10% to 55% of all injuries and often results in prolonged rehabilitation and time out from competition (Garrett, 1996; Croisier et al.,2002). Their treatment is a challenge for all health care professionals, which are involved in the management of rehabilitation and return sporting activities of the athletes. Usually, skeletal muscle injuries are common in professional and amateur athletes. Muscle injuries often occur with over 90% caused by excessive strain or by contusion (Järvinen et al., 2005) and may result in the inability to train or compete for several weeks and have a high tendency to recur (Verrall et al., 2001; Orchard and Best, 2002). A 5-year study of European soccer players showed that muscle strain repre‐ sented 30% of injuries. Among these, those of quadriceps (32%), hamstring (28%), adductor

It has been showed that injured muscles can initiate regeneration promptly, but the healing process is often inefficient and hindered by the formation of scar tissue, which may contribute

The first step in the muscle injuries management is to be able to answer questions that are often asked to physician or physical therapist by the injured athlete: "How long will it take to recover?"; "When can I return to the field?". However, answer to these questions is very difficult because it depend on age, activity level of injured athlete, and by pressure of coaches, parents, managers and media, etc. Unfortunately, until today, the answers to these questions are based

> © 2013 Foglia et al.; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,

© 2013 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution,

distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

(19%), and gastrocnemius (12%) were the most common (Volpi et al., 2004).

Andrea Foglia, Massimo Bitocchi, Manuela Gervasi,

Gianni Secchiari and Angelo Cacchio

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/56550

to muscle re-injury (Huard et al., 2002).

on personal experience rather than on clinical evidences.

**1. Introduction**

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter


**Chapter 6**
