Prevalence, Patterns, and Characteristics of Eye Injuries in Professional Mixed Martial Arts

The medical question

How often do professional MMA fighters injure an eye in competition, and which eye injuries do ringside physicians record?

The Fight Medicine Research Institute uses this evidence to frame questions about eye injuries at professional MMA events, including referral to an eye specialist and time away from contact. The study’s reliance on ringside physicians’ reports from one state, made without imaging, determines which questions it can inform.

Summary

In 2,208 professional MMA fights in Nevada from 2001 to 2020, ringside physicians recorded 369 eye injuries in 363 fighters, most often lacerations of the eyebrow or eyelid or around the eye.

What the work reports

• The authors reviewed the Nevada State Athletic Commission’s records, based on ringside physicians’ reports, for all professional MMA matches in Nevada from September 2001 to March 2020: 256 events and 2,208 fights, representing 4,416 fighters.
• Eye injuries were recorded for 363 fighters (369 injuries) at 187 of the 256 events, and the yearly rate ranged from 2.56 to 12.22 per 100 fighters. The most common were eyebrow and eyelid lacerations (160, 43%), lacerations around the eye (98, 27%) and orbital fractures (62, 17%).
• Of the 363 injured fighters, 228 (62.8%) lost their match; ringside physicians recommended follow-up with an ophthalmologist for 57 fighters and set a no-contact period for 43. The authors conclude that eye injuries in professional MMA are prevalent and often go with losing the match, and they call for state athletic bodies to consider guidelines, noting that recommended no-contact times varied.

Limits to keep in mind

• Injuries were taken from ringside physicians’ reports with no imaging or other tests; the authors note that these physicians are not ophthalmologists and that orbital fractures were diagnosed on examination alone.
• The data cover professional MMA in one state, and the authors say the findings may not apply to amateur competition or to other states.
• The authors did not examine fighters’ weight or age or the round in which the injury happened, and did not review fight video to confirm injuries.
• The records come from the night of the fight, so the study does not report what happened to fighters’ sight afterwards.

Source issues recorded

• The results count 228 of the 363 injured fighters (62.8%) as losing their match and give orbital fractures as 17% of eye injuries. The discussion gives 74% and approximately 14%. This record uses the figures from the results.
• The article gives the average no-contact time as 8.9 weeks (range 1 to 24 weeks). Its Table 3 lists average times of 3 to 5 weeks for every injury type and accounts for 39 of the 43 fighters. This record does not give an average.
• The article states that it is published and licensed by Dove Medical Press Limited. The Crossref record lists the publisher as Informa UK Limited.

Publication status and notices

Published in Clinical Ophthalmology, a peer-reviewed journal. Original research article in Clinical Ophthalmology.

Form of this work: Version of record. The version of record is the final article as issued by its publisher.

No correction or retraction notice was found in Crossref or Europe PMC when this record was checked.

Fight Medicine Research Institute contribution

Fight Medicine Research Institute selected and catalogued this study, prepared an original research summary, verified its bibliographic details, and maintains the associated citation record.

PDF files

Article details

Relationship

External research catalogued by the Fight Medicine Research Institute. The original authors, journal and DOI are unchanged.

Published online

June 2021

Repository date

25 June 2021 (Europe PMC first-publication date)

Date used here

25 June 2021 (Europe PMC first-publication date)

Rights

CC BY-NC 3.0. Open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (CC BY-NC 3.0), as recorded by Europe PMC and the licence link in the source record. The licence does not cover commercial reuse. The summary on this page is Fight Medicine Research Institute’s own wording. No text or figure from the article is reproduced here. Licence terms.

Source check

12 November 2026, against PubMed Central full text, Crossref and Europe PMC. Checked under the direction of Casey C. Sears, Founder. An LLM was utilized as a research tool with direct human oversight.

Appraisal

The check covered bibliographic details, links, licence and notices. It is not a formal critical appraisal of the full paper.

Clinical review

None. This record is a research summary, not clinical education.

Funding and conflicts

The authors state that none of them has proprietary interests or conflicts of interest related to the work. The article contains no funding statement.

Catalog

FH-060, added 12 November 2026

Cite the original work

These files cite the work by its own authors, journal and DOI. Fight Medicine Research Institute appears only in a note, as curator of this catalog page.

Michael J Fliotsos, Donovan Stephen Reed, Gregory Giles, Adam H H Altman, Joseph A Santamaria, Sidra Zafar, et al.. Prevalence, Patterns, and Characteristics of Eye Injuries in Professional Mixed Martial Arts. Clinical Ophthalmology. 2021;15:2759-2766. https://doi.org/10.2147/OPTH.S319025

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Related on this website

• Fighter Health: Eye injuries