What have we learnt from quantitative case reports of acute lateral ankle sprains injuries and episodes of ‘giving-way’ of the ankle joint, and what shall we further investigate?

ABSTRACT

Lateral ankle sprains are a commonly incurred injury in sports. They have a high recurrence rate and can lead to the development of persistent injury associated symptoms. We performed a quantitative synthesis of published case reports documenting the kinematics of acute lateral ankle sprains and episodes of ‘giving-way’ of the ankle joint to provide a comprehensive description of the mechanisms. A systematic literature search was conducted to screen records within MEDLINE® and EMBASE®. Additional strategies included manual search of specific journals, as well as contacting researchers in relevant communities to retrieve unpublished data. Twenty-four cases were included in the quantitative synthesis, 11 from individual case reports and 13 from four separate case series. Two authors independently reviewed all the articles and extracted ankle joint kinematic data. Excessive ankle inversion was the most pronounced kinematic pattern observed across all included cases, with a mean peak inversion angle of 67.5° (range 2.0 to 142) and a mean peak inversion velocity of 974°/s (range 468 to 1752). This was followed by internal rotation and plantar flexion, respectively. A homogeneous linear function revealed a mean inversion velocity across all cases of 337°/s (range 117 to 1400; R² = 0.78; p < 0.0001).

KEYWORDS:

• Sports
• lower extremity
• ankle injuries
• sprains and strains
• case reports
• review of reported cases

Disclosure statement

No authors have any financial interests to declare in relation to this study. The team of authors are, however, independently affiliated with most of the published case reports within the scope of this review, and our findings are thus subjected to confirmation bias and self-citation incentives.

ED is Co-Executive Director, and DTPF is an Executive Committee member of the International Ankle Consortium. DTPF is Editor-in-Chief of Sports Biomechanics and KMM is an Associate Editor of Sports Biomechanics.

Data availability statement

The authors are happy to share the data upon reasonable request.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

The work of FGL is supported by Independent Research Fund Denmark (0136-00283B).