Comparison of Ankle Joint Position Sense in Athletes with Functional Ankle Instability(Non-Coper), Coper and Healthy

Ankle sprain is one of the most common lower limb injuries. The sprain symptoms can be permanent and the person has functional instability of the ankle, but some people can return to their pre-injury period, and these people are called Cooper. Ankle sprain and subsequent functional instability may cause a disturbance in the proprioceptive sense of the ankle joint. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to compare the sense of the ankle joint position in athletes with functional ankle instability (non-Coper), healthy and Coper.

This was a comparative causal study that was conducted in Yazd in 1402. A number of 75 athletes were placed in three groups of ankle functional instability, Coper and healthy. Functional Ankle Instability Diagnosis Questionnaire (IdFAI) was used to diagnose Coper and Non-Coper athletes. At first, with the help of proprioceptive photography, their ankle joint was evaluated as an active reconstruction of the angle with closed eyes in the angles of 20 degrees of plantar flexion and 10 degrees of dorsiflexion, and then the three groups were compared with each other. The collected data were analyzed using one-way analysis of variance, Levens test, Shapiro-Wilk, and Tukey's post hoc statistical tests.

The results of Levens and Shapiro-Wilk test showed that the normality of the data and the equality of variances as the assumptions of the one-way analysis of variance were observed (p>0.05). In addition, the research results showed that between the three groups of ankle functional instability, Coper and healthy in ankle proprioception in plantar flexion (p=0.003) and dorsiflexion (p=0.001), the mean of the functional instability group had more reconstruction error. The results of the Tukey test showed that there was a significant difference between the functional reconstruction error of dorsiflexion and plantarflexion in the functional instability group with the Coper and healthy groups (p<0.05), but no significant difference was observed between the mean of the Cooper and Salem groups (p>0.05).

It seems that athletes with functional instability of the ankle have more angle reconstruction error than the other two groups and as a result have a weaker sense of proprioception. Therefore, sports therapists and rehabilitators should include exercises to proprioception in designing training programs and rehabilitating people with functional instability of the ankle.