Researcher Highlights
Preventing injury through movement-based interventions

Physiotherapist, educator, and researcher Professor Suzanne Snodgrass is helping clinicians improve patient outcomes by showing how just effective movement can be in improving balance and recovering from pain and sports injuries.

Professor Snodgrass is leading the way to better understand human movement in order to prevent and treat injury more effectively.

Her team’s current focus is on the relationship between balance and cognition and finding ways to identify age-related balance decline in adults younger than 65.

“Falls are Australia’s number one cause of injury, hospitalisation and death, and the second leading cause of unintentional injury-related deaths worldwide,” says Suzanne.

“Poor balance is a major risk factor for falls, especially in mid-late life. The number of falls in the general population triples between age 40 and 60 years, indicating middle age is a crucial time for prevention.”

Identifying age-related decline is important, as it enables her to implement targeted programs in middle age to prevent future falls and slow the ageing process.

Professor Snodgrass also works on projects to identify movement-related injury risk factors in athletes and people with pain conditions and develop and evaluate interventions to address them.

Bridging the balance knowledge gap

“There’s a fundamental gap in knowledge in the underlying reasons balance problems develop as you get older and why this happens at an earlier age for some people and not others,” says Suzanne.

“Poor balance is linked to lower cognitive ability, and it can be challenging to balance when you’re also engaged in a cognitive task.

“Balance is also affected by your position sense in your foot and ankle, your vision, and sensors in your inner ear and neck.”

To address the balance and falls gap, Professor Snodgrass and her teamcombine physiotherapy, exercise science, psychology and neuroscience expertise to discover why some people develop balance problems early in middle age.

They’re also developing acceptable and effective targeted prevention strategies to reduce fall risk. An example of such prevention strategies includes physical activity and exercise interventions that incorporate dual balance and cognitive tasks.

Passion embedded in clinical practice

Professor Snodgrass’s expertise in preventing and treating injury using movement originated from clinical interests over a decade of working as a physiotherapist in clinical practice.

To help her patients, she analysed why they might have pain or have injured themselves by looking at how their bodies move during the activity related to their pain or injury. She then taught them movement strategies to aid recovery or prevent future injuries.

She has also applied these strategies to herself and finds that changing her movement strategy or posture through exercise just works.

Because of this success, she wanted to teach others about these approaches, and provide scientific evidence to support movement-based interventions, prompting her to move into research.

Much of her work is embedded in clinical practice, investigating the effectiveness of physiotherapy treatment approaches.

The power of clinical collaboration

Professor Snodgrass involves international and national collaborators in her research, increasing its global impact.

As well as investigating brain activity, cognition and ankle position sense related to balance (University of Canberra, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), her projects include muscle biomarkers related to neck pain (Stanford, University of Sydney), clinical physiotherapy interventions (Tufts), movement variability related to sports injury (University of Nebraska Omaha), and sports biomechanics (University of Sydney).

“Developing international collaborations with clinical researchers in the US has enabled our research to impact clinical practice in other countries,” says Suzanne.

For these projects, they partner directly with clinicians and often survey or interview patients participating in studies to gain their perspectives on treatment interventions. Because of this, their research has consumers engaged throughout the process, increasing translation.

Positively impacting pain and sports injuries

As well as impacting falls and ageing, the difference Professor Snodgrass and her team are making in pain, sports injury and sports biomechanics is palpable.

“We’ve shown that manual therapy to the spine was effective in reducing certain types of shoulder pain, and dry needling to the neck didn’t improve outcomes better than a regime of manual therapy and exercise for neck pain.”

Their findings have been included in professional development programs for practitioners and generated interest from clinicians by reaching more than 1.1 million people on social media.

“Our program of research on hamstring injuries with the National Basketball Association (NBA) in the US has led to an ongoing collaboration where we are analysing movement-based mechanisms for hamstring, ankle and groin injuries in their players, she continues.

“They’ll use our analysis to improve their training and injury prevention programs.”

Being the elite level of sport, the NBA is influential in development programs for young basketball players, so successful strategies for injury prevention that they implement will ultimately help players at the grassroots level, too.

With basketball one of the fastest-growing sports for kids in Australia, their research will also help young Australian players prevent injury and reach their potential.

Potential for people and physiotherapy

Looking forward, Professor Snodgrass is excited about the potential her work has to dramatically improve the health and wellbeing of people as they age.

“Discovering more about why some people have worse balance at a younger age than others, and finding ways to maintain or improve balance skills has great potential to help people stay healthier for longer.”

She also sees her clinical studies as continuing to positively influence how clinicians approach patient management. Ultimately, improvements in rehabilitation will help patients recover from pain and injury.

Through her mentoring, many of her PhD students have gone on to become successful independent researchers or research leaders themselves.

The collective impact of their work on pain and injury mechanisms, physiotherapy rehabilitation approaches, and the future generations of young researchers continue to grow.

Professor Snodgrass remains curious when it comes to finding out how the human body works.

“What drives me is a strong desire to know why and a need to solve problems. For example, why do some people have better balance than others? Can regular exercise improve balance skills as we age?”

These are some of the questions that motivate her to keep trying to find time in her busy professional and family life for research.