Kaunas district primary school pupils' posture assessment

Aim of the study was to assess Posture of Kaunas district primary school pupils with different posture assessment methods. To achieve the aim was to raise the following tasks: 1.Evaluate static children‘s postural peculiarities using different methods and compare the peculiarities of posture according to age, gender and body composition. 2. To evaluate and compare the primary school pupils range of spinal flexion according to age, gender and body composition. 3. Find if there is a connection between the students' range of spinal flexion and static posture. The study was conducted in eight Kaunas district primary schools. A total of 1501 primary school pupils participated in the study, 765 ( 51 %) boys, 736 (49 % ) girls, mean age was 8.5 ± 1.2 years. We used scoliometre, visual postural assessment model based on WWKHoeger (1987 ) and data from photographs for postural assessment. We also assessed subjects spinal flexibility inclinometer. Conclusions: 1.We found that the majority of the students had \"satisfactory\" and \"bad \" ( p < 0.05). With ageing there were less students without any deviation of the spine, number of spine deviations in lumbar and thoracic parts of spine is increasing ( p < 0.05). We also found sagittal curves increase with age ( p < 0.05). 2. Range of spinal flexion showed that the most flexible students were in third grade ( p < 0.05) , girls were more flexible than boys, not according to age ( p < 0.05). Underweight subjects were less flexible than normal or overweight subjects (p<0,05). 3. We found moderate strong negative correlation between spine flexion from S1, „poor“ and „very poor posture“ and flexion from S1, „bad posture“ and flexion from Th12, positive correlation with hyperlordosis and knee hyperextension (p<0,05). Weak negative correlation was found between spine flexion from Th12 and „very bad posture“ (p<0,05) and we found strong positive correlation between both spine flexion ranges (p