FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
CONTACT: Tom Hanley,
Public Relations Director
860-545-9954 or pager 860-220-3562
HARTFORD – Connecticut Children’s Medical Center is recruiting young baseball pitchers for a study of “Little League Elbow.” Researchers in the Center for Motion Analysis at CCMC are seeking Little League pitchers aged 11 to 14 with a minimum of two years of pitching experience for the study.
Eligibility criteria require that the participants be active pitchers in an organized league, be right handed, who have not had previous surgery on the elbow and have no present injury to the elbow.
The study takes approximately an hour to 90 minutes to complete during which the pitchers will have special motion sensor markers attached to their body that assist in recording of biomechanical data. The pitchers will take at least 15 warm up pitches and then throw 10 pitches during which data will be collected. The pitchers will not be financially compensated, however they will receive a CD video that simulates their skeleton going through the pitching motion.
This is the second phase of a pilot study of five pitchers begun last year in a research project being conducted by orthopedic surgeon Dr. Carl Nissen, Assistant Professor of Orthopedics at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Dr. Nissen is seeking answers to what he terms an “epidemic” of elbow injuries. “I’ve done more than a dozen elbow operations on Little League pitchers in the previous six months when 10 years ago I wasn’t doing any,” he says. Dr. Nissen wants to know if there is scientific evidence to pinpoint the forces at work on a young pitcher’s arm when he throws a baseball. “Pitcher’s elbow is a very basic problem and the chance for injury goes up astronomically with the number of pitches thrown,” says Nissen. “Our goal is to get real data on the effects of fatigue on the biomechanics of pitching, to determine if fatigue makes the mechanics go wrong.”
The Center for Motion Analysis at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center is uniquely equipped to conduct the study. It uses some of the same technology that helps software developers create sports video games. Motion sensors attached to the body are tracked by a dozen cameras that translate the results into digital images of a skeleton that can be viewed in three dimension. The biomechanical stresses at the elbow are computed over the entire pitching motion. The Center was designed to study the causes of walking problems in children with cerebral palsy in order to give doctors information they need to perform corrective surgery. A pioneering study of infant walking conducted by the Center for Motion Analysis revolutionized design of the Stride Rite “Natural Motion” baby shoe.
Pitchers interested in participating in the Little League Elbow study should contact
Sylvia Ounpuu, Director, Kinesiologist, Center for Motion Analysis at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center 282 Washington Street, Hartford, CT 06106, 860-545-8710, by fax at 860-545-8842 or by e-mail:
Sounpuu@ccmckids.org.
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