Systematic Review of Hamstring Injury Prevention in Football

Jinfa Gu's systematic review and meta-analysis quantifies the effect of exercise-based programmes on hamstring strain injury risk in football. The analysis includes 15 trials with a total of 7,465 participants, sourced from six databases up to October 1, 2025. It examines how intervention duration, player level, and adherence modify prevention effectiveness.

Use Cases

• Model injury risk reduction (RR) based on adherence levels (e.g., <75% vs ≥75%) and intervention duration (1-6 vs 7-10 months).
• Analyze effect modification using subgroup data for player level (elite/semi-professional vs amateur).
• Calculate absolute risk reduction using the reported control event rate of 7.8% and pooled risk ratios.
• Train models to predict the RR multiplier associated with each 10% increase in programme adherence.
• Validate intervention components against meta-regression results for training frequency and weekly volume.

Strengths

• Analysis synthesizes data from 15 randomized and cluster-randomized trials.
• Pooled results are based on a sample of 7,465 football participants.
• Provides specific risk ratios (RR) with 95% confidence intervals for multiple subgroups.
• Quantifies the relationship between adherence and risk, reporting an RR multiplier of 0.83 per 10% adherence increase.

Limitations

• Certainty of evidence is rated as low by the authors.
• Prediction interval for the main effect crosses the null (0.18–1.40), indicating uncertainty in generalizability.
• Evidence is insufficient to differentiate the effects of specific programme types or components.

Provenance

Source

figshare, author Jinfa Gu.

Collection Method

Systematic review and meta-analysis of six academic databases.

Time Range

Temporal coverage of included trials is not specified; literature search current to 2025.

Freshness

Literature search current to October 1, 2025; dataset last updated April 7, 2026.

Geography

Spatial coverage of included trials is not specified.