For the duration of the childhood and adolescence, spirited sports activities such as basketball, may cause abnormal development of the femur in young athletes. Strenuous physical exertion may result to a deformed hip with reduced rotation and intense pain during movement, the Science Daily says.

Hip-straining sports activities may explain why athletes are more likely to develop osteoarthritis than more sedentary individuals, according to Dr. Klaus Siebenrock, who leads a medical research team from the University of Bern in Switzerland. Siebenrock and colleagues have published their work online in Springer's Journal  of Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research.

Siebenrock and his colleagues discovered that osteoarthritis of the hip was more predominant in high-level athletes than in those who do not take part in regular sports, reports the Science Daily online resource.

Osteoarthritis of the hip was also linked to higher-intensity activities and greater physical loading of the hip, Siebenrock was quoted as saying. He distinguished that other surveys have discovered that male athletes, specifically those who play soccer and handball, and take part in competitive track and field events relating to  running and jumping, are at better risk of early osteoarthritis of the hip, the Science Daily says.

Siebenrock and teammates made a comparison of  the occurrence of cam-type hip disfigurement among elite athletes during childhood and adolescence and age-matched controls. Cam-type hip misshapenness is a ailment categorized by abnormal bone development on the head of the femur affecting the contact between the femur and the hip socket. They observed at the physical condition and wide array of mobility of 72 hips in 37 male professional basketball players and 76 hips in 38 controlled participants who had not participated in high-level sports.

They secured proof of irregularity at the head of the femur, leading to peculiar interaction between the femur and the hip socket, in men and adolescents who played in an elite basketball club since they were eight years old. As a result, internal hip cycle was lessened and hip motion were more likely to be painful. These changes became more noticeable after shutting of the femoral growth plate through late adolescence. Overall, the athletes were 10 times more likely to have impaired hip function than the controlled ones.

"Our data propose that this hip deformity is in part a developmental deformity, and its manifestation in young adulthood may be initiated by environmental factors such as high-level sports activity during childhood and around the time of closure of the femoral growth plate.

Given the part of the irregularity in deteriorating instabilities in the hip, morphological sorts of the femur resulting from dynamic sporting activity are a key element in the higher incidence of hip osteoarthritis observed in athletes," the research concluded. Because of this, more former athletes undergo hip replacement to relieve themselves from hip pains due to osteoarthritis. Though, instead of getting  the ease, hip implants usually may aggravate  the patient’s condition which may  lead into the filing a "Pinnacle lawsuit".