Wear and tear coming too early for too many

"It's not the years, honey. It's the mileage."

That's a funny line from a banged-up Indiana Jones in "Raiders of the Lost Ark." It's not so funny when it applies to athletes whose tender years should make mileage irrelevant.

But it's increasingly a concern among doctors seeing more repetitive stress injuries in young athletes who begin specializing in a sport at an early age.

Dr. Holly Benjamin, one of the co-authors of a 2014 paper in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, said in a recent interview in the Fresno (Calif.) Bee that the issue is youth involvement in sports.

(On the contrary, all we have to do is look at alarming obesity and diabetes rates among young people, or the epidemic preference for digital over physical recreation habits. The health value of athletics and the social value of team sports are beyond obvious.)

"We're concerned," said Benjamin, a professor of pediatrics and orthopedic surgery at the University of Chicago, "about the sports specialization and the year-round training in a single sport," the stresses of which, she said, take their toll in "mileage on the body."

Dr. Neeru Jayanthi, associate professor of orthopedics at Emory here in Georgia, agrees: Specializing in a single sport at a young age increases the likelihood of injury, he said.

The American Medical Association for Sports Medicine has observed that we're burning out some of our best athletes. Not our veteran professionals -- our children. There's a sharp increase in diagnoses of "overuse injuries" -- stress fractures, strained tendons, torn ligaments -- among young sports competitors.

One reason for the increase is not in itself cause for undue alarm: a rise in the sheer numbers of young people involved in sports, a trend that is unquestionably a healthy one in a fitness-challenged culture.

But Dr. Kerry Loveland, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Valley Children's Hospital in California's San Joaquin Valley, told the Bee that the surge in injuries is also a matter of young sports participants doing too much too often: "Everybody needs an offseason from their sport."

Unfortunately, one of the most powerful lures of youth sports -- and an insidious incentive to play through injuries that need medical attention -- is a statistically deceptive one: the pot of gold that is a scholarship or, even less likely, a lucrative professional career. According to Roger Blake of the California Interscholastic Federation, a whopping 1.8 percent of high school athletes get scholarships to another level of competition. Pick from that select few the ones who make it to the pros and you're getting close to lottery odds.

None of these realities should discourage talented young athletes from pursuing a dream. But they, and their parents, need to know what those realities are, and act accordingly.

This story was originally published December 30, 2015 at 3:16 PM with the headline "Wear and tear coming too early for too many."