The ACTN3 Gene is a Potential Biomarker for the Risk of Non-Contact Sports Injury in Female Athletes

Sports injuries can become serious impairments for all athletes. Most notably, female athletes are at higher risk than men for sports injury, for example, anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) disorder. However, there is currently no genetic marker to determine if a female athlete harbors a predisposition for muscle trauma. Hence, we performed single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping of the α-actinin-3 (ACTN3), angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE), and uncoupling proteins (UCP1, UCP2, and UCP3) in 99 young female athletes who had been injured during a sports activity, and we compared the occurrence of muscle traumas with the genotypes using the chi-square test. For the ACTN3 577R allele, the subjects who had non-contact muscle injury had a marked increase in frequency (p-value=0.0015; odds ratio=2.52). The significant increase in non-contact muscle injury related to ACTN3 577R alleles suggests that ACTN3 is likely to be involved in muscle strain and that non-contact muscle injury might occur due to the presence of this allele. It is crucially important for young female athletes to understand their risk for injury, as they might be able to modify their training program to avoid injury, depending on their specific genetic markers.