Eye injuries in youth sport and archery: Chaudhary 2025

The study went back through the medical records of two Indianapolis hospitals from January 2011 to November 2021, looking for eye injuries in patients under 18. Of 1,290 cases, 148 were related to sport. The most frequent causes were baseball (57 cases), basketball (25) and soccer (22); the most common injuries were contusions (122) and hyphaema (12). Few needed surgery, 11 of the 148 according to the data table (the discussion counts 9), mostly for orbital fractures, the majority from baseball.

Archery appears with 2 cases, both in children aged 3 to 11, grouped under "other". In the table of injuries to the back of the eye it appears once among retinal detachments and defects and once among macular scars. Mean visual acuity at first presentation was 20/63 (0.500 logMAR), the second worst after golf; at follow-up, with only one case available, it was 20/15. On this basis the abstract names archery and golf as the sports with the worst effect on initial vision.

It is a retrospective review of records: cases were extracted using ICD-9 and ICD-10 diagnosis codes, and each clinical history was then read to establish the cause of injury. For each patient the authors recorded age, sex, ethnicity, diagnosis, any surgery and visual acuity, converted from Snellen to logMAR; acuity at first presentation was available for 66 patients. Patients are split into two age bands, 3 to 11 and 12 to 18, and comparisons use chi-square and Fisher's exact tests. The paper does not describe how each injury happened, so for archery we do not know whether the cause was an arrow, the string, the bow or something else.

For archery the numbers are far too small to say anything: two cases, and a mean visual acuity calculated on two eyes. The abstract's statement about archery and golf rests on these numbers, and it sits uneasily with the results text, which names baseball and football as the sports with most cases of blindness or severe loss of vision. The acuity table lists an archery value among injuries that needed surgery, while the list of sports with operations does not include archery.

The study counts only children who reached two tertiary hospitals and does not know how many children played each sport, so it cannot estimate risk: baseball has more cases partly because far more children play it. The authors themselves describe the work as descriptive, with many values based on a single case.

For archers, and especially for anyone teaching children, the study is a reminder that an eye injury in archery can be serious: both recorded cases involved the back of the eye. It does not, however, allow anyone to say that archery is more dangerous to the eyes than other sports, since it rests on two children and does not know how many took part. Nor does it describe how the accidents happened, so it says nothing about which precautions would have prevented them. The call for compulsory eye protection with which the authors close is aimed mainly at baseball.