For the past couple of months, I have been pretty busy finalizing some things for the upcoming Belle Biology Day this March. On this day, all of the senior biology majors at Saint Mary’s will present their research projects in the form of a poster and an oral presentation. Since my last update I have been able to measure the right knee flexion angles of each participant through ImageJ. I took the averages of all the angles in both the injured sample and the non-injured sample and I compared them using a Mann-Whitney U test where I found that there was no significant difference in right knee flexion angle between the injured and non-injured groups. I was a little disappointed that the data were not significant, however, I’m not giving up on hope! I think that there are several things that can be improved upon to more accurately approach our original objective and there is currently a student taking over this study to expand and address these improvements. Overall, my final steps have included writing my paper, creating my poster, and preparing for my presentation in March. I’m looking forward to completing my portion of the project and seeing what’s left to come in future studies!
Overall, my study was able to recruit a total of 52 female subjects. Of those, 13 reported a history of knee injury (4 individuals reporting ACL-related injuries) and 39 reported no history of knee injury. There was no significant difference in knee flexion angles between the injured and non-injured groups. We think that the failure to detect statistical significance could be due to a large number of possibilities. The small sample size and the variation in knee injury type and severity among study participants are both reasons why knee flexion angles may have differed. In addition, 11 of the 13 injured individuals went through reconstructive mechanisms such as surgical reconstruction and rehabilitation/PT that could have ultimately regained full function of the knee. Despite the fact that our findings were not statistically significant, we still saw the trends that we were expecting to see! The injured group had smaller knee flexion angles than the non-injured group as we predicted. Further research in the locomotion lab will be able to expand the sample size and hopefully gain more participants with ACL-related injuries! Comments are closed.
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AuthorsAlok Agwick Archives
February 2024
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