Suffering for their art - how do pain and disability affect dancers?

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-05-20 04:00

Australia; WA

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Australian researchers studied 52 female ballet and contemporary dance students over 12 weeks to look for links between the amount and quality of their dance moves and suffering severe pain or pain-related disability. They found almost all the dancers (50 dancers) experienced pain, and half experienced disabling pain (26 dancers). Greater pain-related disability was linked with more light activity, fewer leg lifts to the front, a shorter average duration of leg lifts to the front and fewer total leg lifts. Greater pain-related disability was also linked with higher thigh elevation angles to the side. However, they found no evidence for links between movement quantity and quality and pain severity, and say that despite a high prevalence of musculoskeletal pain, dancers’ levels of pain severity and disability were generally low.