SPORTS
MEDICINE REHABILITATION SECTIONCLINICAL
AND REHABILITATION
PARTICULARITIES IN STRESS FRACTURE AT PERFORMANCE ATHLETES
Oraviţan Mihaela1,
Avram Claudiu1, Vasilescu Mirela2
1Physical
Education and Sport Faculty, West University of Timisoara,
2University
of Craiova, Romania
INTRODUCTION. Stress fracture
is a microfracture that results from repetitive physical loading on a
bone area and is a common injury among athletes. The specific
microscopic and macroscopic changes induce some clinical, therapeutical
and rehabilitation particularities in this pathology; in diagnosing a
stress fracture are important some elements such as: a history of a
recent change in training programme or taking up a new activity, the
moderate localized pain and tenderness, abnormal appearance on
radioisotopic bone scan, CT scan or MRI. An essential component of the
management of stress fracture is the identification and modification of
risk factors (intrinsic or/and extrinsic) among a particular
rehabilitation programme influenced espeacilly by the fracture
localization.
MATERIAL AND METHOD. We made a study on 11
performance athletes (age between 29 ± 3,5 years) with
stress fracture at different skeletal levels (2 at upper limb and 9 at
lower limb); a specific rehabilitation programme consisting in physical
therapy and physiotherapy was applied to all athletes for 2
months; the monitoring of the patients was made by applying specific
tests (for joint mobility near injured area, local muscular force and
other specific functional test).
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION. All
monitored athletes are fully rehabilitated after 4-8 weeks, but the
major changes are made in their training programme in order to avoid
future overuse modifications in the bone structure.
Key words:
stress fracture, athletes, rehabilitation, oversuse, physical
therapy.
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