Published in a peer-reviewed journalOriginal research

Characterising ocular injuries in competitive combat sports in Texas

A retrospective case-control study

Uchenna E Akanno, Mishaal Malik, Maya Alik, Reza Ashrafi, Anne Xuan-Lan Nguyen, Albert Y Wu. 2025. BMJ Open.

Read the full textDOI 10.1136/bmjopen-2024-098197PubMed 41125273

The medical question

Which injuries occur in fighters, and where does medical care need stronger evidence?

Injury surveillance helps the Fight Medicine Research Institute identify questions for prevention, assessment and emergency care. The injuries counted, exposure definition and follow-up period matter when comparing medical risk between settings.

Summary

Researchers reviewed postmatch reports from Texas combat-sport events to describe ocular injuries and their association with match outcomes.

What the abstract reports

  • Post-match physician reports for 3,070 fighters in Texas matches from January 2019 to January 2022 were reviewed.
  • Ocular injury rates were 9.7 per 100 matches in boxing and 12.2 per 100 matches in MMA. Too few kickboxing and Muay Thai matches were available to calculate rates.
  • Ocular injury was associated with losing the match in boxing but not in MMA.

Publication status and notices

Published in a peer-reviewed journal. Retrospective case-control study in BMJ Open. PubMed publication type: Journal Article.

No correction, retraction or expression of concern was found in PubMed, Crossref or Scite 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.

Article details

Relationship
External research catalogued by the Fight Medicine Research Institute. The original authors, journal and DOI are unchanged.
Published online
21 October 2025
Issue date
October 2025, volume 15, issue 10
Repository date
21 October 2025 (Europe PMC first-publication date)
Date used here
21 October 2025 (Crossref publisher deposit, online publication date)
Rights
CC BY-NC 4.0. Open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (CC BY-NC 4.0), 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 abstract text, figure or table from the article is reproduced here. Licence terms.
Source check
, against PubMed (NCBI), Crossref, Europe PMC and Scite. 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
See the source record for the authors’ funding and disclosures.
Catalog
FH-021, added

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.

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