Knee kinematics during a novel hop test with an unanticipated change of direction for female floorball athletes and controls : Evaluation of within-session and test-retest reliability and assessment of knee function

Sammanfattning: Introduction: The incidence of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries in female floorball is relativley high, and the risk for sustaining a second ACL injury is greater compared to previously uninjured. Existing evaluation tests in rehabilition may not be discriminative enough to guide decisions on return to sport Aim: To evaluate the withinAsession and testAretest reliability of knee kinematics in floorball athletes and controls during a hop encompassing a sudden unanticipated change of direction. A second aim was to investigate the discriminative validity by comparing the test outcomes between the athletes and a control group of nonAathletes. Method: 11 elite floorball athletes and 8 controls were tested on two occassions separated by one to three weeks. Knee kinematics, ground contact time and number of succesfull hops were analyzed. Relative reliability was quantifyed by Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and absolute reliability by standard error of measurement (SEM). Results: ICCs for knee kinematics withinAsession reliability were excellent (0.83A0.96) for athletes and poor to excellent (0.40A0.94) for the controls. For the testAretest reliability, the athletes had good to excellent (0.56A0.96) reliability and the controls had poor to excellent (0.26A0.93) reliability. Only two measured kinematic variables were significantly different between the groups. Conclusion: This pilot study indictate good to excellent reliability for the majority of the kinematic variables tested and, therefore, it could be assumed to be adequatley reliable. Discriminative validity needs to be further evaluated in a larger material.