THE COMPARISON OF HIGH-RISK PATTERNS OF ACL INJURY IN DOMINANT AND NON-DOMINANT LEGS OF MALES AND FEMALES DURING CUTTING MANEUVER

Abstract

From injury risk perspective, a change in body direction during fastsport movements is always noticeable while ACL injury is an importantmechanism. This research aimed at comparing high-risk patterns of ACLinjury in dominant and non-dominant legs of males and females duringcutting maneuver. Participants were national and club squash playersincluding 13 females (mean age: 23.04±6.6 yr, height: 163.3±5.4 cm,weight: 61.60±5 kg) and 13 males (mean age: 24.7±4.1 yr, height:179.9±5.8cm, weight: 78.8±7.8 kg). In order to measure knee flexion, trunkflexion, trunk lateral flexion and knee valgus angles during cuttingmaneuver and in two phases of initial foot contact with the ground and midstance, cutting maneuver with dominant and non-dominant legs wasanalyzed. After the markers had been installed, cutting maneuver wasrecorded by Casio Exilim camera with 300 Hz frequency and the recordedmovements were analyzed by WinAnalyze software (Version D34-1). SPSS(version 20) and Paired-samples t test were used to compare the anglesobtained by the motion analysis of dominant and non-dominant legs. Theresults indicated that knee and trunk joint angles during cutting maneuverhad a significant difference between dominant and non-dominant legs offemales while this difference was significant in two parameters of knee and trunk flexion at initial contact among males (P􀂕0.05). These results showed that high-risk patterns of ACL injury had a higher rate of incidence in cutting maneuver with non-dominant leg. Thus ACL injury risk is higher in the cutting maneuver with non-dominant leg than dominant leg.