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The number of female athletes participating at the high school, collegiate, and elite levels has increased nearly 10-fold since the passage of Title IX. President Nixon signed title IX into law in 1972. It required that all schools receiving federal funding provide equal opportunities for men and women. With this large increase in high-level female athletes comes a special set of medical and orthopaedic issues. One of the most important is the female athlete triad. The triad consists of disordered eating, amenorrhea, and premature osteoporosis. Currently, this problem is largely unrecognized. The purpose of this article is to help to educate orthopaedic nurses about this important issue so that we can detect the triad early and help address this growing national health issue.
In the Victorian age, women were believed to be too frail to participate in sports. Something as ordinary as riding a bike was viewed as being too taxing for the Victorian woman. Attitudes gradually changed, and, by 1928, women were allowed to participate in limited capacity in the 1928 Olympics. The longest women's race in the track-and-field events was the 800-meter race, but the cause of the female athlete was not helped by press coverage of this race. The press described the finals of the 800 meters as "eleven wretched women fainting or delirious." Because of this negative press coverage, the International Olympic Committee banned any further track-and-field events in future Olympics. Fortunately, the ban was partially reversed before the 1932 Olympics in the face of a multination boycott. The effects of the negative coverage from 1928 were far-reaching. It wasn't until 1960 that a women's race longer than 200 meters was again included in the Olympics.
The event that changed the face of women's athletics was the signing of Title IX in 1972. Title IX required that all schools receiving federal funding provide equal opportunities for men and women. During the 1971-1972 school year, there were 294,000 high school female athletes. In 1997, there were 2.6 million, nearly a 10-fold increase (Tietz, Hu, & Arendt, 1997). With the increased participation in women in sports, as well as participation at a more elite level, female athletes have developed a unique set of medical and orthopaedic problems, the most concerning of which...