Quick Field Check for Athlete Hip Pain

Researchers wanted to know which college athletes with hip or lower back trouble might need extra attention soon. They built a quick checklist that could be used on the field to sort out who should get a closer look.

They gathered data from 864 athletes at ten different universities. The average age was about twenty‑one years. Roughly eighty percent were male. Each participant answered questions about their health history. They also went through a set of standard movement tests. A group of experts reviewed the results. The experts used a binary reference standard: priority intervention versus self‑management. The experts decided which athletes deserved priority care versus those who could manage on their own.

From that information the team created a fourteen‑item scoring sheet. Twelve items add points when they are present. Examples are localized hip pain, muscle weakness, or a higher body mass index. Two items subtract points. These are a positive leg‑raise sign and hamstring weakness. They act as safety tweaks. A total score of nine or higher was chosen as the cut‑off. This score gave the best balance of catching true cases while avoiding too many false alarms. It caught about eighty‑four percent of true cases. It avoided about seventy‑two percent of false alarms.

The checklist performed well. The area under the curve was 0.85. After bootstrapping, optimism was little. The calibration was spot on. Decision‑curve analysis showed more net benefit than treating everyone or no one. This held for threshold probabilities between twenty and fifty percent. Internal validation used one thousand bootstrap resamples. Over half of the athletes fell into the priority group. That is 53.6 percent. The tool could help clinicians spot those who need a closer look early on.