Growth Plate Injuries, Skeletal Maturity, and Bone Health in Young Dancers: A Bibliometric Analysis.

Authors

Zara Liles-Henry, Vedha Dande, Latha Ganti, Omar Viswanath

Published in

Orthopedic reviews. Volume 18. Pages 165228. Epub Jul 31, 2026.

Abstract

High demands and repetitive loads experienced by young dancers are of major concern regarding growth plate injury and issues of skeletal maturity during development. While dance medicine has become an accepted subspecialty, an evaluation of research literature regarding these specific issues among a youth population has been lacking to observe patterns and gaps. To address these challenges, bibliometric analyses are useful tools to visualize scientific productivity, leading scholars, and research clusters in this niche sports medicine topic.
A bibliometric review was conducted on the WoSCore Collection of scholarly articles from 1973 to 2026. Using keywords "dance," "growth plate," "physis," and "skeletal maturity," results were filtered to yield papers that focused on these topics in young dancers. These data included publication year, author, journal, and geographic origin. These findings were exported to Microsoft Excel for graphical analysis and VOSviewer for keyword co-occurrence and research clusters.
A limited but increasing body of literature has been produced on this topic since the early 2000s, with an increase in the number of publications post-2010. Most of the research originated in the United States, with limited studies in several European countries and Australia. Most papers on this topic were published in the Journal of Dance Medicine and Science. Themes within the literature included the mechanisms of physeal injury, female athlete triad, and training load and its effects on bone health, with Steinberg and Stracciolini being the lead investigators on several large-scale research projects.
The research on dance-associated growth plate injuries and skeletal maturity in the last 20 years primarily comprises data obtained through studies of classical ballet dancers and comes from Western countries. The evidence on long-term outcomes and styles other than ballet is lacking. Multi-center longitudinal research with evidence-based programs is needed.

PMID:
42544355
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 03 Aug 2026.

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