[Professional dance: an appraisal from the occupational health]

Abstract

Background: Dance is essentially an artistic discipline, with the dancer being exposed, as in any other occupation, to occupational risk factors. This document aims at identifying the characteristics about Professional Dance and its impact on the dancer's health.

Methods: Bibliographical review of all the material indexed at: Medline, Embase, Cochrane Library, Lilacs, Cinhal and IME. Using the keywords: dancing, professional ballet, danza (dance), danza profesional (professional dance), bailarín/a/es (dancer(s)) y zapateado (tap dance).

Results: 893 articles were identified: 76 were included in the bibliographical review. 40 of them are focused on the study of traumatic lesions and accidents. 40% are related to rehearsing and 70% affect the lower limbs. 36 articles analyze eating, menstrual, and bone density disorders. 50% describe low weight problems for women dancers, 58% identify delayed menarche and menstrual disorders, while 14% explore the beneficial/harmful effect of intensive dancing on bone mass. 62% are cross-sectional studies.

Conclusions: Scientific production gets us closer to the health condition of dance professionals, but doesn't provide an insight on the cause-effect relationship of this profession's pathologies because most studies are merely descriptive. These studies underline the need of a deeper research on nutrition training, its stand before lesions, social and working conditions, and the training of dedicated professionals on occupational health in professional dance.