A REVIEW OF MUSCULOSKELETAL DANCE SCREEN PERFORMANCE DATA IN COLLEGIATE DANCERS: A TEN-YEAR RETROSPECTIVE STUDY

K. Johnson¹, A. Lasner^1,2, N. Hada³, M. Deluca¹, P. Lien¹, D. Levine⁴

¹Johns Hopkins Medicine, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Baltimore, United States, ²Towson University, Dance, Towson, United States, ³Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States, ⁴The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Physical Therapy, Chattanooga, United States

Background: For ballet and modern dancers, injury is a common occurrence and reported dance injury rates range from 0.62-5.6 per 1,000 hours. Like other athletes, screening is one method that can be used to identify and assess both intrinsic and extrinsic risk factors and serve as a vital component of injury prevention amongst dancers. Screening can be used to predict injury risk, establish normative data, discover pathology, develop characteristics for a given level of performance, determine if an individual possesses attributes necessary for participation in that form of dance, and to establish individual baseline data in order to set educational and training or rehabilitative goals.

Purpose: Currently, the lack of standardization for tests and measurements in screening methodology poses as the main barrier to building more effective, future screening program for dancers. The overall purpose of this study was to describe the ten-year experience of collecting dance screening at a state university to fill critical gaps in the existing literature on dancer screening assessments by producing normative data, describing screening outcome changes amongst a dancer’s college career, and providing guidance to building similar screening programs in the future.

Methods: This original quantitative study establishes normative data found in six tests (the Functional Movement Screen (FMS), Beighton Scale, Harvard Step Test, Y-Balance Test, Sagittal & Frontal Plane Core Stability (Core Strength), and Turnout Test) within the musculoskeletal DanceFIT Screens collected from Dance Performance and Choreography-major students at a state university over the course of ten years. Exploratory data analysis, including Cronbach’s alpha, principal components analysis (PCA), and parallel analysis, and correlation calculations were completed.

Results: 516 DanceFIT Injury Prevention Screens conducted, 477 (92.4%) screens were conducted with females and 38 (7.4%) were conducted with males. Ages of participants ranged from 16 to 32 years (mean [SD], 19.4 [1.80] years). Among the dancers, number of training years ranged from 0 to 27 years (13.0 [4.47] years). For all main outcomes of the screening tests, except Core Strength, the percent change of means increased the most between freshman and sophomore year (i.e., students demonstrated the greatest improvement during this period). The overall screen test’s alpha value, 0.87 (95% CI, 0.86-0.89), fell in the acceptable alpha values range, but a few individual tests’ alpha values fell below or above the acceptable range. PCA, parallel analysis, and eigenvalues demonstrated how four to seven components explained the variance of the screening tests. Anonymous surveying of dance faculty revealed that the DanceFIT screen was either “very” (33.33%) or “extremely important” (66.67%). 100% utilized results of such to adapt their course in some way.

Conclusions: The screening test data indicate replicability for future dancer injury prevention screening programs. Findings from this study suggest increasing the current literature’s 14-point cutoff, adjusting components of screening tests, and adapting courses based on screening test performance in order to reduce injury risk for dancers.

Implications: Dance screening plays an important role in dancer education and rapport building with healthcare practitioners. This may positively influence future health, program design, and reporting behaviors in dance medicine.

Funding acknowledgements: No funding sources to acknowledge

Keywords:
Performing Arts
Injury Prevention
Screening

Topics:
Sport & sports injuries
Health promotion & wellbeing/healthy ageing/physical activity
Musculoskeletal

Did this work require ethics approval? Yes

Institution: Towson University

Committee: Institutional Review Board

Ethics number: 1466