Doctors Work To Prevent Career-Ending Sports Injuries

04/07/2009 11:17 AM retrieved from: http://www.ny1.com/content/ny1_living/health/96985/doctors-work-to-prevent-career-ending-sports-injuries/Default.aspx

If a young Mikhail Baryshnikov and LeBron James were to go down with the same injury at the same time, who'd be most likely to recover faster? NY1 Health & Fitness reporter Kafi Drexel explains why researchers at one local hospital are hoping to learn from comparing dancers to sports athletes.

Chances are if you are a serious dancer or sports athlete, you've also had some serious injuries.

"I was actually jumping during rehearsal. We were doing fast jumps and I landed kind of funny so that took me out for six months," recalls professional ballerina Alexandra Jacob.

"I came down on a bad spot on the floor after dancing for a couple weeks and I had broken a ligament and pulled a bone," says Sam Wilson, another professional ballet dancer.

"Injuries that I've had related to sports are really devastating because then you have to sit and watch your team play and for someone who loves the sport it can really be emotionally and mentally strenuous," says college volleyball player Staren Soanes.

To help prevent what can sometimes be career-threatening injuries, doctors at the Harkness Center for Dance Injuries at NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases have been investigating the differences in how dancers and athletes move – particularly in reference to picking up anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries impacting knees.

"We've done a study on dancers where we found that there is no gender difference between male and female dancers with regard to the incidents with ACL injury," explains Dr. Marjeanne Liederbach at the Harkness Center. "And so we further looked into the way dancers land from jumps because landing from a jump is the most common mechanism of injury for these non-contact ACL injuries in both athletes and dancers."

In a demonstration for NY1, researchers hooked up dancers from the Dance Theater of Harlem and a Baruch College volleyball player with reflective markers and electrodes. High speed cameras around the room record their leaps, jumps, and slips.

To capture the dancers and sports athletes' movements, study investigators are using the same 3D technology used to make movies like "The Matrix."

"What this lab is able to do is look at muscle activity, look at forces," says Liederbach. "When the athlete or dancer in the study lands on the floor, we're able to look at how much force is exerted up through their musculoskeletal system, and with all of the cameras, we're able to measure joint angles during the entire movement phases that we're testing."

Research has already shown that dancers suffer from fewer ACL injuries than athletes. They're also seeing dancers land very differently than how athletes land. Doctors say because dancers are trained differently, perhaps it's something the athletes can learn from.

Through their study, which they hope to complete by summer, doctors believe they may be able develop more suggestions to prevent injuries in both types of athletes.