Return to play of young and adult professional athletes after COVID-19: A scoping review

Abstract

Background/objective: Given the persistence of COVID-19 under various facets and mutations, there is an urgent need to understand the debate on a safe return to play for professional athletes (young and adults) recovering from the infection. This work offers a scoping and comprehensive review on the topic during the first two years of the pandemic event by providing an identification of main clusters of research, relevant gaps and significant insights for future investigation.

Methods: The literature is selected using the search engines of: PubMed®, SCIENCEDIRECT, and SCOPUS. Further criteria for selection are: Time range of 2020-2022; Scope: Return to play of professional athletes recovering from COVID-19 infection; 3) Types of publications: Research papers, reviews, practice guidelines, case reports; 4) Language: English. Two independent researchers performed a quality check on a random sample (n = 30%) of publications.

Results: Main results reveal four research clusters deepening the analysis on: myocarditis, cardiac diseases and return to play, training and rehabilitation, mass screening and risk assessment, and sport and bio-psycho-social sphere for a safe return to play. Major collaborations occur between UK-South Africa, UK-USA, USA-Canada, and USA-Australia.

Conclusions: Important gaps refer to a lack of investigation on a safe return to play for female athletes in mostly all sports disciplines; on the other hand, sport and the bio-psycho-social sphere of the athlete is a fast-growing topic. Both deserve further attention in the immediate future to improve ad-hoc sport and exercise practices.

Keywords: COVID-19; Professional athletes; Return to play; Scoping review.

Fig. 1

PRISMA Protocol for literature selection^, * Records automatically detected by R software and revtools library²⁵ ** Records removed not falling within document types such as: Research articles, reviews (including meta-analysis and systematic reviews), case reports, practice guidelines.

Fig. 2

Countries' collaboration map. Notes: Min. edge = 2; Edge size = 5. The network of scientific collaboration across country is obtained by connecting a ‘manuscripts by authors’ matrix (https://www.bibliometrix.org/vignettes/Introduction_to_bibliometrix.html), whereas its magnitude is visualised through nodes (=authors) and their linkages (=co-authorships).

Fig. 3

Bibliographic coupling of keywords. Layout: Attraction = 2.00; Repulsion = 1. Clustering: Resolution = 2; Min. Cluster size = 5.