Clinical evaluation of ophthalmic findings in active, amateur, adult, competitive male boxers in India

The medical question

Which eye injuries are found in active boxers, and where does eye care for fighters need stronger evidence?

The Fight Medicine Research Institute uses this evidence to frame questions about how often eye damage is present in active boxers and which findings an eye examination can detect. The study’s single examination, its sample of young male amateurs and the absence of a comparison group determine which questions it can inform.

Summary

Eye examinations of 100 active amateur male boxers in India found at least one abnormal finding in 51 of them, most often healed eyelid scars.

What the work reports

• The authors examined both eyes of 100 active amateur male boxers, each with at least three years in competitive sport, at a tertiary care centre in Pune, India, between August 2020 and January 2022.
• 51 boxers had a finding in at least one eye and 49 had normal eyes. The findings included eyelid scars in 25 boxers, subconjunctival haemorrhage in 12, posterior synechiae in 7, traumatic mydriasis in 5, angle abnormalities in 4, traumatic cataract in 3, lens subluxation in 3 and raised eye pressure in 3; no macular lesion was found.
• The authors conclude that boxing-related eye injuries are common in India and name traumatic cataract, lens subluxation and angle abnormalities as the main sight-threatening findings. They recommend regular eye examinations for all boxers.

Limits to keep in mind

• Each boxer was examined once, so the study shows what was present at the examination and cannot show when or how a finding arose.
• There was no comparison group of people who do not box.
• The authors name the limited sample size and the young age of the boxers as the main limitations, and note that professional boxers were not included.
• The abstract says that none of the findings could be attributed to boxing, which conflicts with the article’s conclusion, and the article does not say how many boxers had the optical coherence tomography scan.

Source issues recorded

• The article’s licence statement names the Creative Commons Attribution License without a version number. The licence address in the PubMed Central XML is for version 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), while the same statement in the published PDF links to version 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Crossref holds no licence entry for this DOI and Europe PMC records the licence as “cc by”, so this record gives the licence as CC BY without a version.
• Europe PMC gives a first-publication date of 1 January 2024, the start of the January to March 2024 issue and earlier than the acceptance date printed on the article (10 March 2024). The publisher’s Crossref deposit gives 31 March 2024 online and 15 April 2024 in print, and this record uses the Crossref dates.
• The abstract lists the eye findings and then says “None of these could be attributed to boxing”. The conclusion of the abstract and the article’s Conclusion section describe the findings as boxing-related. This record reports what was found and attributes the link with boxing to the authors.
• The abstract gives the average age of the boxers as 24.98 years. The Discussion gives the mean age of the boxers as 25 years and gives 24.98 years as the mean age of those with eye findings (23.56 years for those without).

Publication status and notices

Published in Romanian Journal of Ophthalmology, a peer-reviewed journal. Original research article in Romanian Journal of 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 and a narrative review, verified its bibliographic details, and maintains the associated citation record. It holds an unmodified copy of the published article under the article’s licence.

PDF files

Article details

Relationship

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

Published online

31 March 2024

Issue date

15 April 2024, volume 68, issue 1

Repository date

1 January 2024 (Europe PMC first-publication date)

Date used here

31 March 2024 (Crossref publisher deposit, online publication date)

Rights

CC BY. Open access under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), as stated by the publisher. The summary on this page is Fight Medicine Research Institute’s own wording. An unmodified copy of the published article is held on this website under this licence. Rights statement at the source.

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 no funding and no competing interests.

Catalog

FH-039, 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.

Mandhoof Moosa, Jaya Kaushik, Ankita Singh. Clinical evaluation of ophthalmic findings in active, amateur, adult, competitive male boxers in India. Romanian Journal of Ophthalmology. 2024;68(1):25-30. https://doi.org/10.22336/rjo.2024.06

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Related on this website

• Fighter Health: Eye injuries