Home-based training can prevent ankle sprain
Friday July 10th, 2009
Taking part in a special training programme can help prevent recurrent ankle sprain, new research has found.
Ankle sprain is the most common sport injury, with about half of cases requiring medical treatment. In the year after injury, athletes have twice the risk of a further ankle sprain, so effective prevention measures are crucial.
Professor Willem van Mechelen of the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and colleagues evaluated an unsupervised training programme for ankle sprain patients.
They recruited 522 male and female athletes aged 12 to 70 years, from a wide range of sports, who had sustained a lateral ankle sprain within the previous two months.
Patients received standard medical care with or without an eight week home-based training programme. The programme consisted of three sessions of 30 minutes of exercises per week to improve balance and motor coordination skills, known as proprioception abilities.
In the following year, 22 per cent of the intervention group and 33 per cent of the standard care group reported a recurrent ankle sprain.
On the website of the British Medical Journal, the researchers report that the training programme was associated with a significant 35 per cent reduction in risk. One recurrence was prevented for every nine athletes who completed the programme.
They conclude: "The use of a proprioceptive training programme after usual care of an ankle sprain is effective for the prevention of self reported recurrences. This proprioceptive training was specifically beneficial in athletes whose original sprain was not medically treated."
Tags: Europe | Fitness | Orthopaedics
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