Synthetic turf

Artificial pitches raise two different questions. Injury risk has actual comparative studies, and the answer is mixed and sport-specific: some find more lower-limb and knee injuries on turf than grass, others find no difference, and newer surface generations behave differently from older ones. The chemical worry — crumb rubber infill made from recycled tyres — has been investigated mainly through exposure measurement and government assessment rather than clinical trials, so it barely appears in a library built from clinical designs. Read the thinness here as a gap in the research, not as reassurance.

Reviewed 2026-09-20

Official sources

How this list was built

We searched Europe PMC for English-language papers published since 2005 whose title contains “artificial turf” or “synthetic turf” or “crumb rubber”, kept meta-analyses, systematic reviews, trials and observational studies, because a diet or exposure like this cannot be randomised for long and its outcome evidence lives in cohorts, then ranked them by study design first, then recency and citations. Retracted papers are removed.

Open a paper to read its abstract and ask for an AI brief of what it found.