Article Sidebar
Published:
Jan 26, 2009Article Details
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Main Article Content
Accuracy of bone assessments for verifying age in adolescents - application in sport
Abstract
Background. Cheating often occurs in sports that are defined by age when older participants compete by falsifying their true age. In some cases administrators have responded by implementing a programme that attempts to establish true age by measuring the skeletal age of competitors. However, because the technique has not been validated in this context there is a risk that competitors who are the correct age may have been unfairly excluded from competition based on these tests. Objective. To determine whether this technique has sufficient precision to be used effectively to identify ‘age cheats'.
Methods. Twenty-three males (14 - 18 years) volunteered for the study. Their skeletal age was determined by means of an X-ray assessment of the hand and wrist undertaken by nine experienced radiologists. Results. The coefficient of variation of skeletal age for each subject predicted by the different radiologists ranged from 0% to 3.8%. The average
difference between the chronological and skeletal ages was -0.5 years (95% confidence interval: -0.9 - -0.1 years), with a maximum underprediction of 2.4 years and maximum over-prediction of 0.9 years. The magnitude of the error in the prediction did not seem to be related to either the mass or stature percentile of the subjects. Conclusion. The technique of assessing skeletal age in an attempt to identify sports participants who are older than the prescribed age limit lacks the necessary precision. Until such time as an objective biological method is available to predict age more accurately, sport administrators
should rather develop structures that can verify the accuracy of birth certificates.
South African Journal of Radiology Vol. 11 (2) 2007: pp. 4-7
