Epidemiology of Muay Thai fight-related injuries

The medical question

How often do Muay Thai fighters report being injured in a fight, and which fighter characteristics go with injury?

The Fight Medicine Research Institute uses this evidence to frame questions about how often fighters are injured in sanctioned Muay Thai bouts and how experience, protective equipment and earlier injury relate to that. The data are fighters’ own reports from a largely self-selected sample, which determines which questions it can inform.

Summary

In a web survey, just over half of 195 professional and amateur Muay Thai fighters reported an injury in their most recent fight, most often to an arm or leg and usually not one that stopped them finishing the fight.

What the work reports

• Between April 2010 and January 2011 the researchers ran a web-based survey of fighters who had competed in sanctioned Muay Thai fights. 195 fighters completed it: 154 recruited through sanctioning bodies, emails and social media, and 41 of 90 fighters drawn at random from nine randomly chosen events. Each fighter described the single most severe injury, if any, from their most recent fight.
• 108 of the 195 fighters (55.4%) reported an injury, which the authors give as 55 injuries per 100 fight exposures. The extremities were the main site (58.6%), ahead of the head and neck (30.6%). Bruises (38.7%) and cuts (14.4%) were the most common injuries, and 6 fighters (5.4%) reported a concussion. 72 injured fighters (66.7%) said the injury did not interfere with completing the fight.
• Fighters with more than 15 fights had higher odds of reporting an injury (odds ratio 2.7, 95% CI 1.5 to 4.9), as did professionals (odds ratio 2.5, 95% CI 1.4 to 4.5). Fighters who wore headgear or shin pads as well as gloves reported fewer injuries in an unadjusted comparison (odds ratio 0.46), but that link did not remain after adjustment for other factors. The authors conclude that the injury rate is preliminary and that the associations need more rigorous research into causes.

Limits to keep in mind

• Most respondents were a convenience sample. The authors say injured fighters may have been more likely to respond, so the injury rate may be an overestimate, and the results are not representative.
• Injuries were self-reported from memory, up to six months after the fight, and the authors note that the questionnaire was not validated.
• Each fighter reported only the injury they judged most severe, and an injury had to be painful to count. The authors say this could have led to under-reporting of concussion.
• Training injuries were not included.

Source issues recorded

• Table 3 is headed n = 108, but its counts by body region sum to 111, and its percentages are calculated on more than one denominator. This record gives the percentages as the source reports them.
• The abstract and Table 2 give 85.9% of respondents as male. The Discussion says women made up 17% of the sample.
• The article states that the authors received no financial support. Europe PMC’s record for the article also lists a United States National Institutes of Health grant (NIGMS, U54 GM104942). This record reports the article’s own statement.

Publication status and notices

Published in Injury Epidemiology, a peer-reviewed journal. Original research article in Injury Epidemiology.

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

12 December 2016

Issue date

December 2016, volume 3, issue 1

Repository date

12 December 2016 (Europe PMC first-publication date)

Date used here

12 December 2016 (Crossref publisher deposit, online publication date)

Rights

CC BY 4.0. Open access under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY 4.0), as recorded by Europe PMC and the licence link in the source record. 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 article states that the authors received no financial support for the research, authorship or publication, and that they have no competing interests.

Catalog

FH-067, 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.

Stephen Strotmeyer Jr, Jeffrey H Coben, Anthony Fabio, Thomas Songer, Maria Brooks. Epidemiology of Muay Thai fight-related injuries. Injury Epidemiology. 2016;3(1):30. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40621-016-0095-2

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Related on this website

• Fighter Health: Injury surveillance in boxing, MMA and bare-knuckle fighting