Epidemiology of sports injury in pediatric athletes.

In the United States, youth interest in sports participation has increased steadily over the past 2 decades. Although such trends are encouraging to the medical community, especially given the concurrent obesity epidemic among American youth, this increase in sports participation is accompanied by an increase in rates of sports injury in the pediatric population. Appropriate diagnosis and treatment of these injuries by primary care and orthopedic providers rests heavily on a fundamental understanding of the epidemiology of such pathologies.