Department of Emergency Medicine, The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston 3 . Incomplete and illogical responses were excluded. The survey included questions about surfer demographics, injury date, type, anatomic location, mechanism, and severity. 426 individuals reported 458 acute injuries and 178 chronic injuries.
Laceration is the most common type of acute surfing injury.
Although subject to selection and recall biases, this injury surveillance system may encourage improvements in equipment design and lead to recommendations for use of protective gear. Currently there are more than 1.7 million surfers in the United States and over 18 million surfers world-wide. The popularity of surfing is growing rapidly, especially among women and internationally, and surfing-related injuries have become more commonplace as more surfers take to the waves. Studies aimed at determining the type and cause of surfing-related injuries are sparse, and most are limited to small sets of surfers in a particular geographic location. Each of these studies found that laceration is the most common surfing-related injury and that most injuries involve the head and neck.