School Screening of Spinal Malailgments in 7-9 years old students in South of Tehran-Iran: A cross sectional study

This study was done to evaluate the spinal alignment to verify the prevalence of spinal malailgments such as FHP⃰, thoracic hyper kyphosis, lumbar hyper lordosis and scoliosis in 7-9 year-old students in south of Tehran 2017. In this cross-sectional study, 2114 healthy students with mean age of 7.99±0.81 years old, including 1059 girls and 1055 boys were screened. A sociodemographic questionnaire used to gathering personal information and visual spinal assessment from side of body to determine any derailment toward plumb line and FBT⃰ for detecting scoliosis. Data analysis was done using descriptive and regression methods on SPSS software version 21. The prevalence of FHP was 68.4%, hyper lordosis 69.1%, hyper kyphosis 68.6% and scoliosis 15.7%. There was significant association among FHP with gender and age, also between hyper kyphosis with BMI⃰, among hyper lordosis with gender and BMI and finally among scoliosis with age and BMI. Hyper kyphosis, hyper lordosis and Scoliosis were more frequent in girls but FHP in boys. Another interesting result was susceptibility among underweight children with hyper kyphosis, hyper lordosis and scoliosis. There wasn’t any significant association among FHP, hyper kyphosis, hyper lordosis and scoliosis with habit of school bag carriage. According to the high prevalence of spinal malailgments at this age, it seems necessary to implement screening programs in schools to find problems exactly, then made perfect plan and finally perform the planning to decrease progressions of malaignments at the right time.

BMI⃰= Body Mass Index
FBT⃰= Forward Bending Test
FHP⃰= Forward Head Posture