Pickleball-related eye injuries are on the rise

Eye injuries related to pickleball have increased at an “alarming rate” as the sport's popularity has exploded in the US, a new study finds.

- NICOLETTA LANESE

More and more people in the US are taking up pickleball as a leisure activity, with recent estimates suggesting that 19.8 million people participated in the sport in 2024, up about 45 per cent from 2023 and 311 per cent from 2020. Eye doctors have found that this uptick in people playing the paddle sport has triggered a rise in related eye injuries. For this study, they turned to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), a government-funded database that documents consumer product-related injuries. NEISS primarily gathers its data from samplings of about 100 hospitals with emergency departments (EDs), which are selected as a representative snapshot of the more than 5,000 US hospitals with EDs.