Return to Martial Arts after Surgical Treatment of the Cervical Spine

The medical question

When, and on what evidence, do martial arts athletes return to their sport after cervical spine surgery?

The Fight Medicine Research Institute uses this evidence to frame questions about medical clearance to return to combat sports after surgery on the neck. The evidence is one new patient and 23 published cases, most of them wrestlers, which determines which questions it can inform.

Summary

A professional judoka returned to his sport seven months after neck surgery, and with him the authors count 21 of 24 reported martial arts athletes who returned to their sport after cervical spine surgery, all from case reports.

What the work reports

• The authors describe one patient, a 21-year-old male professional judoka with a C5-C6 disc herniation. After three months of non-surgical treatment he had an anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF). In October 2022 the authors also searched PubMed, Scopus and Cochrane, following PRISMA guidelines, for reports of martial arts athletes who had cervical spine surgery and whose return to play was described.
• Eight articles described 23 athletes: 16 in wrestling, 1 in kickboxing, 1 in sumo and 5 in unspecified martial arts. Counting the authors’ patient, 21 of 24 athletes (about 88%) returned to their sport after surgery: 4 within 3 months, 10 in 3 to 6 months and 7 after more than 6 months. The judoka returned 7 months after surgery. No major complication after return was reported.
• Single-level ACDF was the most common operation (11 cases). The authors conclude that returning to martial arts within one year of cervical spine surgery is generally safe, and they name solid fusion and the absence of neurological impairment as criteria. They add that each case needs its own evaluation and that larger studies are needed.

Limits to keep in mind

• The authors state that the level of evidence is low: only case reports were available, some of a single patient, and few cases have been reported.
• The authors state that the reports differed in surgical technique, implants, rehabilitation and outcome measures, and that these could not be analysed.
• 16 of the 23 athletes found in the literature were wrestlers, 1 was a kickboxer, 1 took part in sumo, and the sport of the other 5 was not specified.
• The authors state that no long-term follow-up data were available on the risk of problems at adjacent levels of the spine.

Source issues recorded

• The abstract gives the date of the literature search as 21 October 2022. The Methods section gives 29 October 2022.
• The article was published online on 20 December 2022 in volume 13, issue 1, which Crossref and PubMed Central date January 2023. This record uses 2022, the publication year given by Crossref and Europe PMC.

Publication status and notices

Published in Journal of Personalized Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal. Case report and systematic review in Journal of Personalized Medicine.

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

20 December 2022

Repository date

20 December 2022 (Europe PMC first-publication date)

Date used here

20 December 2022 (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 no funding was received. It declares that Edoardo Mazzucchi and Giovanni Sabatino are consultants for Brainlab AG and that the other authors have no conflict of interest.

Catalog

FH-068, 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.

Giuliano Di Monaco, Edoardo Mazzucchi, Fabrizio Pignotti, Giuseppe La Rocca, Giovanni Sabatino. Return to Martial Arts after Surgical Treatment of the Cervical Spine: Case Report and Systematic Review of the Literature for an Evidence-Based Approach. Journal of Personalized Medicine. 2022;13(1):3. https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm13010003

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