Are dancers more susceptible to injury when transitioning to full-time training or professional companies? A systematic review

Are dancers more susceptible to injury when transitioning to full-time training or professional companies? A systematic review

Overuse injuries in developing athletes can be a consequence of disproportionate training loads with insufficient rest and recovery. Emerging athletes in their first year of competition in the professional Australian Football League have been shown to have a lower threshold to injury compared to more experienced athletes. In contrast, increasing age has been shown to be a risk factor for injury in dance. In the dance medicine literature, a systematic review by Hincapie and colleagues (2008) includes two investigations considering the risk of younger or lower ranked dancers. The first reporting that younger dancers sustained more ankle sprains and bone stress injuries, whereas the rank of dancers in a professional ballet company was shown not to be related to injury. It has been suggested that a conflating factor may be that dancers with higher status possess greater autonomy to manage their injuries and that younger dancers may not have the experience or confidence to manage their workloads. This systematic review aims to investigate whether dancers are more susceptible to injury at two key stages of their training and career development: transitioning to fulltime training, when they experience an increase in training hours; and transitioning to professional companies when performance demands increase. Six electronic databases have been searched: Pubmed, Embase, CINAHL, SPORTdiscus, Scopus, and the Performing Arts Database. Medical subject headings used in PubMed were “wounds and injuries”, “musculoskeletal diseases” and “dancing”. Keywords used were: injur*, sprain, strain*, “muscul* dis*”, danc* and ballet. Only original studies in ballet and/or contemporary dance that report injuries across age, rank, years of experience, junior and main companies, and year level in training institutions were included. The findings of this investigation include risk and rate ratios of injury for transitioning dancers compared to seniority, calculated from data extracted from the included studies. Other reports of the susceptibility to injury of transitioning dancers will be presented qualitatively. This review may provide practical insights into the management of workloads for transitioning dancers into full-time training or professional companies.

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