Within just three weeks this summer, Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital in eastern Jiangsu Province received five children with spinal injuries caused by dancing.
Treating children’s spinal injuries and deformities caused by movements such as backbends and somersaults has become a global challenge over the past two decades, according to Liu Zhen, associate chief of the hospital’s spinal surgery department.
An 11-year-old girl, one of the five, became paralyzed from the waist down at the age of 5 after practicing backbends in a dance class. Over the next six years, she also developed scoliosis, a sideways curvature of the spine.
“This is a common complication of paralysis,” Liu told . “Children with this kind of
