Overuse Injuries in Professional Anatolian Folk Dancers: A Descriptive Study Verified with MRI.

Background: Professional dancers are artists as well as athletes who push their bodies beyond limits for aesthetic expression. Therefore, overuse injuries are common. We present our findings on overuse injuries in Anatolian (Turkish) folk dancers.

Methods: The Fire of Anatolia dance group comprises of 82 dancers (37 male, 45 female) with a mean age of 27.96±5.05 yrs (range 18 to 38). Forty-one dancers from this group presented to our clinic between February 2009 and April 2016 with complaints of pain, and 25 of them had magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for verification. The type, frequency, and anatomical locations of their overuse injuries as found on MRI were investigated.

Results: We evaluated a total of 70 overuse injuries in 25 dancers. All injuries were seen on separate occasions, and multiple injuries in the same dancers at separate times were recorded. Most of the overuse injuries were seen around the knee joint. Ankle ligament injuries were not seen in our study, in contrast to ballet and modern dance. Overuse injuries were observed in the knee in 68% of cases, thigh in 24%, lumbar region in 24%, feet in 20%, shoulder in 16%, and hip in 12%.

Conclusions: Overuse injuries occur mostly in the knee region in Anatolian folk dancers. There were no statistically significant differences between dancers with and without overuse injuries in terms of age, sex, and dance style (p>0.05).