Muscula skeletal injuries of the professional dancers

Objectives: Our study is planned to identify the musculoskeletal characteristics of theprofessional dancers and to evaluate its relation with their injury profiles.Material and Method: The study was performed the working place of ?Şaman Dance andRhythm Theatre? at Istanbul Teknik University, with the participation of 16 male and 26female volunteered dancers. Information regarding the demographic characteristics,dominancy, tobacco and alcohol habits, dance histories (dance types, training periods, agestarted to dance), dance surface, type of footwear; warm up, cool down, stretching exercisehabits, the age planned for quitting professional dance and past injury profiles of the dancerswere gathered by questioners. For the clinical evaluation; pectoral muscles, hip flexormuscles, hamstring muscles, tensor fascia lata and lumbar extensor muscles were assessed forshortness. Also trunk hyper extension, lateral flexion and sit & reach tests were performed forflexibility. Range of Motion for specified joints was measured by using a universalgoniometry and Beighton scale was used for evaluating generalized laxity.For statistical analysis ki-square, Mann Whitney U and t tests were performed byStatistical Package for Social Sciences 11.0 (SPSS 11.0)Results: The most frequently injured joint is found to be the ankle joint (30.0%) and the leastfrequently injured is the foot complex (5.0%). Dancers performing proper warm up exercisesbefore the class tend to get less injured (p‹0.05). Also increased number of injuries wereobserved in the dancers with higher results in sit & reach test (p‹0.05).Conclusion: In the multi disciplinary dance style, that is created by combining Turkish folkdances with ballet, modern and jazz dance steps, most injuries are to the ankle joint. Alsowarn up exercises that are done before the class and the amount of trunk flexion are the mostimportant factors that affect the injury.Key Words: Dance, Injury Profile, Muscula-Skelatal Injuries