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Landing biomechanics shed light on ACL injury differences in dancers, athletes
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Female team sport athletes displayed a greater knee valgus than male team sport athletes and male and female dancers, whereas dancers exhibited better trunk stability compared with athletes, according to study results.
Researchers recorded kinematics and kinetics for 40 elite modern and ballet dancers and 40 team sport athletes as they performed three single-legged drop landings from a 30-cm platform onto a force plate. Using a group-by-sex multivariate analysis of variance, the researchers compared joint kinematics and kinetics between groups and sexes, followed by pairwise t tests.
Male and female dancers and male team sport athletes landed similarly with regard to frontal-plane knee alignment, whereas female team sport athletes landed with a significantly greater peak knee valgus. The researchers also found female dancers had a lower hip adduction torque compared with the other three groups. Lower trunk side flexion and lower trunk forward flexion was found among dancers vs. team sport athletes.
“These findings may be related to the lower ACL injury rate that female dancers experience compared with female team sport athletes and the lack of sex disparity in ACL injury rates among dancers,” the researchers concluded.
Disclosure: Researchers received funding from The Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation.
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