POSTURAL QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS IN MOUTH BREATH CHILDREN

Abstract

The chronic mouth breath, considered in six months time, can provoke alterations in the corporal posture, besides requiring more effort from the inspiration accessory muscles result in a shorter stimulus from the diaphragm muscle. The objective of this study is to extract features and classify data in a 30 mouth breath children and 22 nasal breath children database containing the posture and distance of the diaphragm muscle excursion variables. Therefore, a model of unsupervisioned artificial neural networks was used, specifically the self-organizing map (SOM), in order to help the comprehension of postural behavior and its relations towards the diaphragm muscle alterations. From the clusters generated by the SOM two categories of mouth breath children were detected. On the first, it was found cervical lordosis similar to the cluster of nasal breath associated to a lower mean distance of the diaphragm excursion if compared to all other clusters. On the second category it was found a reduction of the cervical lordosis if compared to an mean of nasal breath cluster, associated to a higher distance of the diaphragm muscle excursion if compared to the first category. From these results the authors suggest that when there is a nasal obstruction, there might be a head position anteriorization and cervical lordosis loss to enlarge the air space. This behavior makes easier the air entrance to the inferior airways associated to a bigger effort of the inspiration accessory muscles and from the diaphragm, whenever they try to suppress this demand.