British Journal of Sports Medicine

Abstract One hundred and nineteen cases of injuries sustained by skateboard users are reviewed. A significant proportion of the injuries sustained were fractures. The absence of adequate protective measures was noted. A decrease in the popularity of the sport, as judged by the annual incidence of skateboard injuries, is apparent in this series.

To compare the clinical efficacy of foot orthoses in the management of patellofemoral pain syndrome with flat inserts or physiotherapy, and to investigate the effectiveness of foot orthoses plus physiotherapy.Prospective, single blind, randomised clinical trial.Single centre trial within a community setting in Brisbane, Australia.179 participants (100 women) aged 18 to 40 years, with a clinical diagnosis of patellofemoral pain syndrome of greater than six weeks' duration, who had no previous treatment with foot orthoses or physiotherapy in the preceding 12 months.Six weeks of physiotherapist intervention with off the shelf foot orthoses, flat inserts, multimodal physiotherapy (patellofemoral joint mobilisation, patellar taping, quadriceps muscle retraining, and education), or foot orthoses plus physiotherapy.Global improvement, severity of usual and worst pain over the preceding week, anterior knee pain scale, and functional index questionnaire measured at 6, 12, and 52 weeks.Foot orthoses produced improvement beyond that of flat inserts in the short term, notably at six weeks (relative risk reduction 0.66, 99% confidence interval 0.05 to 1.17; NNT 4 (99% confidence interval 2 to 51). No significant differences were found between foot orthoses and physiotherapy, or between physiotherapy and physiotherapy plus orthoses. All groups showed clinically meaningful improvements in primary outcomes over 52 weeks.While foot orthoses are superior to flat inserts according to participants' overall perception, they are similar to physiotherapy and do not improve outcomes when added to physiotherapy in the short term management of patellofemoral pain. Given the long term improvement observed in all treatment groups, general practitioners may seek to hasten recovery by prescribing prefabricated orthoses.Australian Clinical Trials Registry ACTRN012605000463673 and ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00118521.

To review the published literature on the effectiveness of interventions to promote physical activity in children and adolescents.Systematic review.Literature search using PubMed, SCOPUS, Psychlit, Ovid Medline, Sportdiscus, and Embase up to December 2006.Two independent reviewers assessed studies against the following inclusion criteria: controlled trial, comparison of intervention to promote physical activity with no intervention control condition, participants younger than 18 years, and reported statistical analyses of a physical activity outcome measure. Levels of evidence, accounting for methodological quality, were assessed for three types of intervention, five settings, and three target populations.The literature search identified 57 studies: 33 aimed at children and 24 at adolescents. Twenty four studies were of high methodological quality, including 13 studies in children. Interventions that were found to be effective achieved increases ranging from an additional 2.6 minutes of physical education related physical activity to 283 minutes per week of overall physical activity. Among children, limited evidence for an effect was found for interventions targeting children from low socioeconomic populations, and environmental interventions. Strong evidence was found that school based interventions with involvement of the family or community and multicomponent interventions can increase physical activity in adolescents.Some evidence was found for potentially effective strategies to increase children's levels of physical activity. For adolescents, multicomponent interventions and interventions that included both school and family or community involvement have the potential to make important differences to levels of physical activity and should be promoted. A lack of high quality evaluations hampers conclusions concerning effectiveness, especially among children.