Analysis of body posture in children with mild to moderate asthma

Abstract

The mechanical alterations related to the excessive use of accessory respiratory muscles and the mouth breathing observed in children with asthma may lead to the development of alterations in head posture, shoulders, thoracic region and, consequently, in alterations of body posture. The purpose of this study was to assess body posture changes of children with asthma compared to a non-asthmatic control group matched for gender, age, weight, and height. Thirty children with asthma and 30 non-asthmatic children aged 7 to 12 years were enrolled in this study. Digital photographic records were obtained for analysis of the body posture of the children by computed photogrammetry. The intraclass correlation coefficient and Student's t test (p < 0.05) were used for statistical analysis. There were no significant differences between groups for the angles analyzed, except for the knee flexor angle. These results demonstrate that children with asthma did not present postural alterations compared to non-asthmatic controls since the only angle for which there was a significant difference between groups showed weak reproducibility. The findings of this study do not support the notion that children with asthma present alterations in body posture.

Clinical methods for quantifying body segment posture: a literature review

“…However, except for Raine's study [32], no study offers an evaluation of posture including all body segments. The angle or distance measurements were obtained by printing a metric grid on an overhead transparency and then aligning this grid with vertical gridlines by using the plumb lines visible on the photographs [21] or by developing software programs and using digitizing process to obtain x and y coordinates of previously placed reflective markers on anatomical landmarks [32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. The intra-rater and inter-rater reliability was good for the majority of the posture indices (>0.75) ( Table 1 -A).…”

“…The intra-rater and inter-rater reliability was good for the majority of the posture indices (>0.75) ( Table 1 -A). However, some authors have reported poor to moderate levels of intra and interrater reliability (ICCs: < 0.75) for posture indices such as sagittal head angle [32, 35,40], shoulder protraction and scapula angle [33], frontal pelvis angle [33,35], angles in cervical, thoracic and lumbar frontal and sagittal curves [41,42] and for some distance measurements in frontal or sagittal plane [37,43]. When using the ICC (2,1) type to generalize the results to the universe of occasions and raters, one can observe lower reliability coefficients [35,40].…”

“…Healthy men (20,(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34) Tape measuremnt (Sagittal pelvic tilt in neutral, active anterior tilt and active posterior tilt) …”

Associação entre as alterações posturais e a respiração bucal em crianças

“…Sendo assim, o presente estudo teve como objetivo veri icar Concordando com o exposto, Yi et al (8) encontraram diferença signi icativa entre RB e RN em todas as curvaturas da coluna vertebral e posição da pelve em crianças de 5 a 12 anos. Esses dados discordam do presente estudo, que veri icou a presença de alterações posturais em ambos os grupos pesquisados, na faixa etária dos 8 aos 10 anos, assim como Belli et al (32), que veri icaram alterações posturais sem diferença signi icativa entre RB e RN, na faixa etária dos 7 aos 12 anos.…”

Alterações posturais e função pulmonar de crianças respiradoras bucais

“…These changes tend to progress with the passing of the years, as per observed in our results: with an increase in age, posture adaptations intensify in order to make up for the drop in vital capacity, causing a progressive increase in head projection and neck lordosis (Table 1). Numerous studies have assessed the association between respiratory dysfunction and posture changes in other clinical situations; nonetheless, in such papers muscle-skeletal changes and posture balance changes are seen as consequence of the additional stress employed during normal ventilation 15,16,17 . The results from our study bring about an important contribution as they show changes to the respiratory function arising from posture changes.…”