You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Editorial
What is the relationship between groin pain in athletes and femoroacetabular impingement?
  1. M Ferguson1,
  2. J Patricios2,3,4
  1. 1 The Centre for Sports Medicine and Orthopaedics, Johannesburg, South Africa
  2. 2 Morningside Sports Medicine, Johannesburg, South Africa
  3. 3 Section of Sports Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa
  4. 4 Department of Emergency Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
  1. Correspondence to Dr Jon Patricios, PO Box 1267, Parklands 2121, South Africa; jpat{at}mweb.co.za

https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2014-093818

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Groin symptoms in athletes have been likened to the Bermuda Triangle as sports physicians, orthopaedists, surgeons and therapists alike are easily sucked into a sea of confusing suppositions and assumptions.1 Possibly the greatest advance in the understanding and appreciation of ‘sports hernia’ has been the recent acknowledgment by a multidisciplinary panel of experts that there is in fact no hernia associated with the condition and they have coined the term ‘inguinal disruption’.2 Unfortunately, although the authors describe a constellation of symptoms, the label again suggests a localised pathology rather than a syndrome.

    A broader focus required

    As much as we concentrate our collective efforts on repairing a defect in an anatomical area or treating what we consider to be the primary area of injury, perhaps we should explore and investigate the concept that symptoms are a result of a structural failure of tissue to compensate for abnormal loads created by an imbalance of forces across the groin area. Single or multiple areas of groin injury may represent a failure of the same functional unit. The proposal of a ‘pubic joint’, distinct from the symphysis pubis, which involves numerous anatomical structures and their resultant forces at different contact sites can explain the multiple pathologies that exist in this condition. …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors MF researched and drafted the original paper. JP reviewed, expanded and reformatted the article.

    • Competing interests None.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    Linked Articles