Incidence, Diagnosis and Management of Injury in Sport Climbing and Bouldering: A Critical Review

Competition climbing as an Olympic sport will debut at the 2020 summer games in Tokyo. The aims of this article are to critically review the incidence of injury in sport climbing and bouldering; the pathophysiology and presentation of finger and shoulder injuries; and the diagnostic and therapeutic algorithm for finger injuries. A semisystematic approach in reviewing literature on incidence was applied. Articles were identified after searches of the following electronic databases: Discover, Academic Search Complete (EBSCO), PubMed, Embase, SPORTDiscus, and ScienceDirect. Despite methodological shortcomings of the included studies, we estimated the mean + standard deviation of the incidence rate of injury in sport climbing and bouldering from the eight studies to be 2.71 ± 4.49/1000hrs. Differential diagnosis and the clinical management of finger and shoulder injuries in climbers is challenging. An updated diagnostic and therapeutic algorithm for finger injuries is presented.