Effects Of Volleyball Training On Metacarpal Morphology And Structure In Teenagers:an Analysis Of CT Images

Objectives and methods: According to the sports biomechanics mechanism, chronicstress stimulus may affect the growth and development of bones. In the present study, a med-ical CT image technology was used to study the effects of volleyball training on metacarpalmorphology and structure. There were9male juvenile professional volleyball athletes (vol-leyball group) and8male non-volleyball ones (control group) as the subjects. Their handswere scanned by a multi-slice spiral CT, and then the images were reconstructed with two andthree dimension. The two-dimensional images were screened, grayed, enlarged and cut, en-hanced, separated, etc., and then the gray of each metacarpal were measured. After each me-tacarpal in the three-dimensional images was separated manually, their CT value, length, vo-lume and width of metacarpal heads were measured. Then, the metacarpal head size and indexwere calculated. Differences of the parameter values were analyzed statistically.Results: Compared with the control group,1) the gray of the first, fifth metacarpals inright hand and the all metacarpals in left hand (P <0.05), the gray of the second metacarpal inright hand (P <0.001), and the gray of the third and fourth metacarpal in right hand (P <0.01)decreased in the volleyball group;2) the CT value of all the metacarpals in left and righthands in the volleyball group decreased (P <0.05);3) the metacarpal length of left and righthand in the volleyball group significantly increased (P <0.001);4) the metacarpal volume ofleft and right hand in the volleyball group significantly increased (P <0.05);5) the metacarpalhead size of the first metacarpal in right hand significantly increased (P <0.01), the metacar-pal head size of the second, third, fourth metacarpals in right hand and the first, second, thirdmetacarpals in left hand in the volleyball group increased (P <0.05);6) the metacarpal headindex of the first, second, third, fourth metacarpals in right hand and the second, third, fourthmetacarpals in left hand decreased (P <0.01), the metacarpal head index of the fifth metacar- pal in right and left hand decreased (P <0.001), the metacarpal head index of the first meta-carpal in left hand (P <0.05) decreased in the volleyball group. There was no difference ofevery parameter value between the right and left hand in the volleyball group.Conclusions: The stress induced by volleyball training would lead to an adaptive changeof the metacarpal morphology and structure in male juvenile athletes, which include a de-crease in gray and CT value of metacarpal bones, an increase in metacarpal length, volumeand metacarpal head size, a decrease in metacarpal head index. There were similar changes ofthe metacarpal morphology and structure between the no-spike hand and spike hand amongthe young volleyball athletes.