Residual symptoms that athletes complained of
resulted from previous ankle sprains and are presented
in Figure 6. Of the athletes, 30.2% complained
about pain in their injured ankle which was the major
complaint. The second most common complaint was
the sense of ankle instability (20.4% of athletes),
followed by crepitus of ankle joints (18.2% of
athletes) and weakness (16.5% of athletes) in the
injured ankles.
The injured or sprained ankles were further
divided into three subgroups for analysis of various
residual symptoms in relation to the frequency of
recurrence: group 1 - 149 ankles that had only been
sprained once; group 2 - 290 ankles sprained two to
four times; and group 3 - 124 ankles sprained five or
more times.
Results showed that for any specific ankle there
was a trend towards an increase in complaint of
residual symptoms with an increase in the number of
sprains (Figure 7). For example, only 9.4% of ankles
in group 1 had symptoms of residual instability, but
instability was complained of for 37.9% of ankles