ABSTRACT
Unlike most other sports, the upper extremities are often used as weight-bearing limbs in gymnastics, so that the wrist is a site of considerable physical loading. Hence, attention is often given to injuries of the hand and wrist[1, 2]. Although wrist pain is often viewed as a pure consequence of the sport, e.g. gymnastics[3], other authors focus on epiphysial trauma and related changes caused by repetitive gymnastic loading mainly of the distal end of the radius at its interface with the carpals[4, 5, 6]. Further, some authors claim that repetitive injury to the radial epiphysis may inhibit normal growth of the radius resulting in “positive ulnar variance”[1, 5, 6, 7], i.e. the distal end of the ulna exceeds the distal end of the radius. An opposite phenomenon is known as negative ulnar variance. Although ulnar overgrowth is often observed in gymnasts, most of the available studies are based on “patients” or “case” reports, i.e. those individuals who present themselves to a clinic with wrist pain. However, a ‘normal’ ulnar variance distribution was observed in a representative sample of outstanding female gymnasts, as studied by Claessens et al. [8] in 156 participants of the 24th World Championships in Artistic Gymnastics, held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1987. Up till now, ulnar variance results in gymnasts were only gathered based on cross-sectional data, so that the real influence of repetitive gymnastic training on this ulnar variance phenomenon is not known. The aim of this study is therefore to investigate the impact of gymnastic training on the ulnar variance in young female gymnasts longitudinally followed over a 4 year period.
