CLINICAL AND REHABILITATION PARTICULARITIES IN STRESS FRACTURE AT PERFORMANCE ATHLETES

SPORTS MEDICINE REHABILITATION SECTION

CLINICAL AND REHABILITATION PARTICULARITIES IN STRESS FRACTURE AT PERFORMANCE ATHLETES

Oraviţan Mihaela¹, Avram Claudiu¹, Vasilescu Mirela^2
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.