Intense young athletes boost therapy demand

By Kim Dixon and Ben Klayman

CHICAGO (Reuters Life!) - Teenager Jeff Snell winds up his lithe body, balances on one leg and hurls one ball after another into the corner of a stark white room - with eight cameras tracking the angle of his every move.

The 16-year-old's pitching style is captured on a computer by high-speed cameras at Chicago's Children's Hospital. It is one of a growing number of sports medicine programs that analyse the movements of competitive child athletes to improve performance and prevent injuries.

"You need to do all these things in the off-season so the coaches will look at you," said Chris Snell, Jeff's mother, explaining her interest in the analysis, which costs $550 and is not covered by insurance.

Top sports doctors across the country say the intense focus on a single sport at earlier ages by child athletes - and their parents - is taxing young bodies.

As the intensity of young athletics has risen, so has the number of injuries. At least 3.5 million children under the age of 14 had treatment for a sports injury in 2004, the latest year data is available, according to the non-profit Safe Kids USA.

The non-profit American Sports Medicine Institute reported a six-fold spike in elbow surgeries in high school students in the four years ending 2004 compared to a previous four-year period.

"We are having to operate on these kids at a high-school level, where you used to do the same surgeries with professional pitchers," said Pietro Tonino, chief of sports medicine at Chicago's Loyola University Health System.

"Although they are young athletes, they are not handled like young athletes," he said.

Sceptics say it is money driving this trend with more parents pushing their children, some with unrealistic expectations about their offspring's talents.

"Youth sports is a business now and there are travel teams, there are personal trainers that parents are willing to pay for," said Eric Small, chair of a panel on sports medicine at the American Academy of Pediatrics and assistant professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

"There is a lot of disposable income out there. It's just keeping up with the Joneses."

AN INVESTMENT

But the demand for sports medicine programs is also partly driven by hopes for sports scholarships to defray rising U.S. college tuition costs which can average about $24,000 a year.

The repetitive nature of baseball pitching makes it suited for this type of motion analysis, experts said.

"About five years ago, Major League baseball started to realize they could protect their investment by analyzing mechanics," said Glenn Fleisig, head of research and education at the American Sports Medicine Institute's clinic in Alabama.

Snell, who is not injured, pitches more than a dozen times under the eye of Nick Gryfakis, a biomechanical engineer using software to calculate and analyse joint angles.

"We look at his trunk and when it is turning, and determine if he is leaning too much or too little, and then compare that with the scientific literature," Gryfakis said.

Young baseball players are most vulnerable in the elbow and shoulder, with growth plates that adults don't have.

"It's almost like a paper clip that you bend once or twice and it's fine but you keep bending it and all of a sudden it snaps," said Nicholas DiNubile, an orthopedic surgeon and consultant for the professional basketball team the Philadelphia 76ers.

Experts agree limiting the number of pitches is the best way to avoid these injuries, but this is hard to monitor.

"You may limit their number of pitches...but that same kid might be going to travel or club practice and the parents are in the backyard throwing to them," said Darrell Burnett, a Southern California clinical psychologist specializing in youth sports.

"The overuse thing is really going to become a wake-up call for a lot of parents. Sports can offer good memories, but the typical thing is adults take over and take the fun out of it," he said.

Hospitals see sports medicine as a growth area and needed profit center, according to DiNubile. But Tonino and others said it is still too early to judge how well these programs work.

"Intuitively it looks like it might be a good idea, but there is not a lot of science behind it right now," he said.