In this article, we will discuss mouth breathing and posture.
Have you ever paid attention to whether or not your child is breathing through the mouth?
By nature, the "oral cavity" is not included in the respiratory system, so there may be some disorder in the nose or some other cause that causes mouth breathing.
One of the disorders is thought to be a narrowing of the airway for breathing, which may be caused by poor posture. It is sometimes thought that this is the case.
This is not an uncommon idea, and you can find articles describing poor posture just by searching the Internet.The study I'm going to introduce here investigates whether there is a relationship between posture and mouth breathing. Is there a relationship between posture and mouth breathing?
The study
Mouth-breathing syndrome can impair children's performance in daily life and can lead to sleep disturbances and postural abnormalities related to the head and neck.
However, there is no clear evidence that postural abnormalities are associated with mouth breathing in children.
The purpose of this study was to assess the methodological quality of relevant studies and to determine if there is an association between mouth breathing and postural disorders in children.
Ten studies were included and the participants included a total of 417 children between the ages of 5 and 14.
Two studies used the New York State Posture Rating Scale, seven studies used photographs to assess posture, and one study used motion capture to assess posture.After assessing the quality of the studies, all studies scored low.
Points identified as low quality included participants, methods used to access posture, key confounders, and a clear description of the lack of power analysis.
In conclusion, these studies show low quality evidence of an association between mouth breathing syndrome and poor posture in children aged 5-14 years.
Discussion
Theoretically, the explanation of poor posture and mouth-breathing syndrome is a legitimate one.
It is the way posture is assessed that has been raised as a problem in this study.
Since it is difficult to track down what is written on the score sheet, an "accurate" evaluation is needed at the time of measurement.
Since the skill of the examiner is important in this regard, it seems that quantified training will solve this problem.
Next, regarding photography, since variations in posture and other factors can easily occur depending on the conditions set during photography, photography is the only thing that should require practice.
Without sufficient training, it is possible that the landmarks used for taking photographs may be misaligned and cannot be properly evaluated, or that the landmark settings themselves may be vague.
Recently, posture evaluation software seems to be able to evaluate with less variation than the human eye, but these also require photographic skills because of the errors caused by the software and the use of photographic data.
In the end, it all comes down to how much training a person has in posture evaluation in order to operate and evaluate. In the end, how well trained are you in posture evaluation?
Neiva PD, Kirkwood RN, Mendes PL, Zabjek K, Becker HG, Mathur S. Postural disorders in mouth breathing children: a systematic review. Braz J Phys Ther. 2018;22(1):7-19. doi:10.1016/j.bjpt.2017.06.011
Conclusion
If you want to get a decent posture evaluation, you might as well use a tool that analyzes the photos taken by software.
Posture results can easily change depending on the evaluator, so there is no need to take anything seriously when someone tells you about your posture just by looking at you.
