Rates of Reporting and Analyzing Patient Sex in Sports Medicine Research: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Background: Sex differences in sports medicine are well documented. However, no studies to date have reviewed the rate at which sex is reported and analyzed in the athlete-specific orthopaedic sports medicine literature.

Purpose: To determine the rates of reporting and analyzing patient sex in athlete-specific sports medicine literature.

Study design: Systematic review; Level of evidence, 4.

Methods: Articles published by the 3 journals of the AOSSM (American Journal of Sports Medicine [AJSM], Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, and Sports Health: A Multidisciplinary Approach) between 2017 and 2021 were considered for inclusion. Original sports medicine research studies that isolated athletes were included. Studies that isolated sports that are predominantly single sex at the college and/or professional levels (football, baseball, softball, and wrestling) were excluded.

Results: Of the 5140 publications screened, 559 met the inclusion criteria. In total, 93.9% of all studies reported patient sex, and 34.7% of all studies analyzed patient sex. However, 143 studies only included males and 50 studies only included females (n = 193). When excluding these single-sex studies, analysis of the remaining 366 studies found that the rate of sex-specific analysis increased to 53.0%. Rates of reporting patient sex did not significantly differ by journal or by year. Similarly, rates of analyzing patient sex did not differ by year, but Sports Health analyzed sex the most frequently, and AJSM analyzed sex the least frequently (P = .002). Studies that isolated college (84.1%), youth (66.7%), or recreational (52.6%) athletes analyzed sex at or above the overall rate of 53.0%, but studies of elite athletes (35.7%) tended to analyze sex less frequently.

Conclusion: Patient sex is well reported in the athlete-specific sports medicine literature (93.9% of included studies reported sex), demonstrating that most studies include sex as a demographic variable. However, patient sex was analyzed only in 53.0% of studies that included both male and female patients. Given that athlete-specific sex differences are known to exist within the field of sports medicine, many studies that could benefit from using patient sex as a variable for analysis likely fail to do so.

Keywords: athlete; sex difference; sports medicine.