Abstract

Practicing ice hockey can cause a high number of injuries due to frequent physical contact between players, playing surface and material such as puck, boards and sticks. Tegner & Lorentzon [1] reported that 74% of the injuries occurred during games and 26% during practice. The injuries were localized to the knee in 13.2%. The use of prophylactic knee orthoses is very common among worldwide ice hockey players to prevent recurrent lesions of the medial collateral ligament (MCL) and the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). However, their effects are still widely discussed in the literature owing to the low level of evidence in studies and discrepancy in results.

Keywords: Retrospective epidemiological pilot study; Recurrent injury; ACL; MCL; Prophylactic orthosis