Surgeon General's bone health project: translation of research to mitigate injury risk in Royal Marines recruits

Excerpt

Overuse injury, including stress fracture (SF), in military training results in significant economic losses and individual discomfort. The 32-week Royal Marine (RM) training programme is recognised worldwide as the most arduous initial training programme. Research has failed to fully identify bone density and structural differences between SF personnel and controls due to inadequate adjustment for confounding factors and poor sample size. Moreover, whilst associations have been reported between serum 25-hydroxyvitamin-D (25(OH)D) and SF risk, the threshold for this effect remains unclear. This programme determined if 25(OH)D concentrations were associated with SF risk during military training, and investigated physical and bone differences between matched (age, body size and aerobic fitness) injured and uninjured recruits, to inform future policy and practice. …