Youthful Arm Injuries Cause Adult Surgeries

When Christopher Ahmad, M.D. Chief of sports medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, began seeing five to six patients a day who were complaining of sore arms, he became concerned. At the same time, according to Shazia Khan, a reporter for Warner Cable News, Ahmad observed an increase in the number of major league baseball players who required surgery on their elbows.

Ahmad, who is head team physician for the New York Yankees, decided to look into it. As Khan reported, Ahmad had a theory that these mature professional athletes were experiencing injuries that dated back, in subtle ways, to injuries to their arms that they had sustained when they were young players. He decided to find out.

Ahmad organized a study of 200 ball throwers between the ages of 8 to 18. Khan reports that the results of his investigation shocked him. Among his findings, published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, were that three-quarters of the youth in the study reported having pain in their arms when throwing. Half of them reported being told to keep on playing despite experiencing pain—to throw through the pain.

Khan quoted Ahmad as saying, “If they are developing an injury and they are encouraged to push through it, they will get to a point where they will have irreversible damage in their shoulder and elbows that may affect them immediately, requiring surgery or may affect them later in life where they will have shoulder and elbow problems.”

For young players Ahmad recommends no pitching on consecutive days, full recovery days during the week and up to three months off—with no throwing—in a calendar year. He continues to trace the injuries experienced by professional players to their experience as teen-agers when they continued to throw the ball despite the pain in their arms.