Though males and females have the same musculoskeletal structures, there are some unique differences that actually make female athletes more prone to injury. In regard to skeletal differences, males usually have wide shoulders and narrow hips, whereas a female generally has a wide pelvis in relation to the width of her shoulders. The females wider pelvis is necessary for childbirth. This wider pelvis in females leads to an increased inward slant of the thigh and, therefore, an increased Q-angle of the knee. An increased Q-angle produces excessive lateral forces on the quadricep’s mechanism and abnormal tracking of the patella. This is one of the reasons why chondromalacia patella or patellofemoral syndrome is more common in women. As stated above, a female’s thighs tend to slant inward towards the knees more than a male’s. This puts additional strain on a woman’s hips and their ligamentous support.
The average body fat content of the female is approximately 26 per-cent, compared with that of the male at 14 percent. The female has a lower lean body mass indicating less muscle mass. The greater muscle mass in males is due to the predominant effect of the androgen hormones, whereas estrogen, predominant in females, results in increased body fat. As it turns out, this difference in hormones is key to understanding why female athletes are more easily injured and repair more slowly than their male counterparts. Testosterone stimulates fibroblastic proliferation, whereas estrogen, especially estradiol, inhibits it. It is for this primary reason that female athletes can benefit from Prolotherapy for their sports injuries. Estrogen makes a woman a woman, but they have a definite negative effect when it comes to healing sports injuries.
Females also have a smaller proportion of muscle in relation to body size because of the hormonal differences. Having less muscle tissue means there is less muscle to stabilize the joints if the ligaments are injured. This causes more stress to be placed on injured ligaments in women.
Females have a low metabolic rate, the rate of conversion of food to energy under conditions of total rest. This could be one explanation why females heal sports injuries slower than men. Females performing strength training gain increased strength with relatively less muscle hypertrophy. Because females have significantly less testosterone, when a woman does weight strength training, she will get stronger, but she cannot turn herself into a body shaped like a man because the hormones are just not there. Recent epidemiological studies have recognized a significantly higher anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury rate in female athletes as compared with male athletes in sports such as basketball, hand-ball, gymnastics, and soccer. Although various causes of this phenomenon have been postulated, including differences in ligament or muscle strength, conditioning, endurance, anatomy, and training techniques, the most plausible appears to be the hormone factor.
Unique to the female athlete is her exposure to a constantly changing hormonal milieu throughout her reproductive years. For most of her life, the female athlete is exposed to rhythmic variation in either endogenous hormones during a regular menstrual cycle or exogenous hormones via oral contraceptives. It has been only recently that it was discovered that there are estrogen receptors on the fibro-blasts of the human ACL, suggesting that female sex hormones may have an effect on the structure and composition of this ligament. Dr. Stephen Liu and associates, at the UCLA School of Medicine, made this discovery and went the next step to find out exactly how estrogen affects ligament growth. They investigated the effects of 17B-estradiol on the cellular proliferation and collagen synthesis of fibroblasts derived from the rabbit anterior cruciate ligament. Measuring 3H-thymidine and 14C-hydroxyproline incorporation assessed fibroblast proliferation and collagen synthesis, respectively. They found that collagen synthesis was significantly reduced with increasing local estradiol concentration. Declining collagen synthesis was first noted at a 17B-estradiol concentration of 0.025 ng/ml. Within physiologic levels of estrogen (0.025 to 0.25 ng/ml), collagen synthesis was reduced by more than 40 percent of control, and at pharmacological levels of 2.5 and 25 ng/ml, as typically occurs in female atheletes taking birth control pills or estrogen replacement therapy, by more than 50 percent of control. A significant reduction of fibroblast proliferation was also observed with increasing estradiol concentrations. These results are startling.
Estrogen, the female hormone, dramatically inhibits fibroblasts. These fibroblasts are what make the collagen that makes up the ligaments and tendons, which are injured during sports. Estrogen was shown in the above study to inhibit the fibroblastic growth and thus collagen formation in a dose-dependent manner. The more estrogen a woman has, the more inhibition will occur. This has direct effects for all women taking birth control pills. Birth control pills have pharmacological levels of estrogen, which are far in excess of a woman’s normal production. The simplest way for a female athlete, who is on artificial estrogen, to overcome sports injuries, is to stop taking them. Inevitably, women are placed on birth control pills because of menstrual irregularities, which are easily treated with natural medicine techniques including diet manipulation and nutritional supplements.
The female athlete inevitably comes up essential fatty acids deficient. This means they need to injest more good fats in their diets in the form of omega-3 fatty acids as is found in fish oils. They are encouraged to drink cod liver oil and eat more fish. Better kinds of fats are also found in nuts and seeds, flaxseed oil, and olive oil. Just this mild change in diet is typically all that is needed to get rid of menstrual cramps and other menstrual irregularities. Sometimes, however, more sophisticated dietary manipulation, herbal supplementation, or other natural medicine techniques may be needed.
Article from CaringMedical.com
