Acute ankle sprain injury alters kinematic and centre of pressure measures of postural control during single limb stance

Background: Upright single-limb stance (SLS) is maintained via integration of visual, vestibular and somatosensory afferents. The presence of redundancies between these afferents allows the sensorimotor system to simplify a specific task within a number of strategies. Musculoskeletal injury challenges the somatosensory system to reweight distorted sensory afferents. No current investigation has supplemented kinetic analysis of eyes-open and eyes-closed SLS tasks with a kinematic profile of lower limb postural orientation in an acute lateral ankle sprain (LAS) group to assess the adaptive capacity of the sensorimotor system to injury.
Objective: To compare centre of pressure (COP) and lower limb postural orientation characteristics of participants with acute LAS to non-injured participants during a SLS task.
Design Cross-sectional: Setting University biomechanics laboratory. Participants: 66 participants with acute LAS completed a task of eyes-open SLS on their injured and non-injured limbs (task 1). 23 of these participants successfully completed the SLS task with their eyes closed (task 2). A non-injured control group of nineteen participants completed task 1, with 16 completing task 2. Main outcome measures: 3D kinematics of the hip, knee and ankle joints as well as associated fractal dimension (FD) of the COP path. Results: Between trial analyses of groups revealed significant differences in lower limb kinematics and FD of the COP path for task 2. Post-hoc testing revealed that non-injured control group bilaterally assumed a position of greater hip flexion compared to LAS participants (injured limb=7.41±6.1◦ vs 1.44±4.8◦; non-injured limb=9.59±8.5◦ vs 2.16±5.6◦), with a corollary of greater FD of the COP path (injured limb=1.39±0.16 vs 1.25±0.14; non-injured limb=1.37±0.21 vs 1.23±0.14).
Conclusion: Acute LAS causes bilateral impairment in postural control strategies.