The Relantionship between Mouth Breathing and Postural Alterations in Children: A Descriptive Analysis

Lilian Huberman KRAKAUER, Arnaldo GUILHERME

The present study focused on the analysis of corporal posture of children with mouth breathing. Trough the descriptive analysis of pictures in Frontal position (observing the symmetry/asymmetry of the shoulders), Sagital (analyzing the position of the head in relation to the Sagital axis) and Dorsal (observing the symmetry/ asymmetry of the scapulae), one has analyzed 150 pictures of children with mouth breathing and 90 pictures of children with nasal breathing, all of them between 5 and 10 years of age. The pictures have been taken with a Polaroid camera, with grid film. The results have shown the following: 1) there are no differences, concerning the studied postural alterations, between boys and girls, be it mouth breathers or nasal breathers; 2) the use of photographic tracking has proved efficient to he type of analysis proposed; 3) for children ranging between 5 and 8 years, there are no statistic differences between postural alterations of nasal breathers and mouth breathers within the three studied categories; 4) for children older than 8 years, the number of postural alterations is greater among mouth breathing children; 5) the greatest number of alterations is observed in the Sagital axis; 6) after 8 years of age, children with nasal breathing show greater corporal harmony than mouth breathing children. The speech-pathology effort focused on mouth breathing, with children between 5 and 8 years old, plays a very important role from a preventive point of view, in order for these children not to develop more serious postural problems with consequently grater difficulty of rehabilitation.

Keywords: Mouth Breathing. Corporal Posture. Speech-Pathologist Assessment.

Friday, May 03, 2024 06:28