Discovering the prevelance of analgesic medications used at different levels of baseball

Introduction: Bouts of throwing arm pain and injury are a common occurrence among professional and amateur baseball athletes. Many modalities to treat these are available and are widely used, including; physical therapy, manipulative medicine, non-medicinal and non-invasive anti-inflammatory measures, surgical, rest protocols, and analgesic medications. This study aims to determine the prevalence of analgesics used by baseball players for throwing arm specific pain and correlations that could suggest reasons for why these athletes use these medications.

Methods: This is a survey study designed to obtain information about an individual athlete about the number of years played, analgesic use, arm pain, injuries, procedures and surgical procedures on their throwing arm.This study included anyone who had played baseball for at least five years, played at the high school level or higher & was ≥18 years old at the time of completing the survey.

Results: The results showed that of the 161 respondents 78.26% (n=126) used analgesics with 72.04% reported arm pain and/or injury and 7.93% (n=10) used medications without reporting any pain and/or injury to their throwing arm. Of the players who took medication, 33.3% (n=42) reported having one or more procedures or surgeries on their throwing arm while 11.42% (n=4) of the athletes who did not use pain medications reported having one or more procedures or surgeries on their throwing arm.

Conclusion: These results suggest that analgesic treatment among the different levels of baseball athletics have a significantly high usage of analgesic medication that could be correlated to arm pain, injuries, past surgical procedures or other invasive modalities. A larger sample size is needed to determine a more correct prevalence rate among these athletes and a deeper look into when they started using these medications and for what reason(s).