Fatigue fracture of the ulna occurring in pitchers of fast-pitch softball

Abstract

We have reported three cases of fatigue fracture of the ulna in male pitchers of fast-pitch softball. To elucidate the etiology of injury, we first selected three healthy male and three healthy female pitchers from a well-trained college team and analyzed their forearm movement by high-speed cinematography. This showed slight flexion of the elbow joints during wind-up motion, dorsal flexion of the hand joints upon releasing the ball, and extreme pronation of the forearms during the follow-through. We then took 8 mm CT scanning sections of the forearms. Using these images, we investigated shapes and areas of cross-sections of the ulna and its cortical and cancellous bones from the elbow to the hand joints. Our results reveal that the shapes of the sections are significantly different from circles at around the center of the ulna, and the cross-sectional areas are smaller in the middle one-third of the ulna than in other parts. These observations imply that fatigue fractures of the ulna in pitchers of fast-pitch softball must be torsionally induced, tending to occur at the middle one-third of the bone.