The relationship between musculoskeletal posture and gross motor development in girl children 6 to 9 years old

Abstract

Introduction: Regarding the prevalence of skeletal abnormalities in children, which may be related to factors such as inheritance, daily wrong habits, non-standard equipment and facilities and also lack of participation in sports activities, as well as the prevalence of motor poverty, it seems that there is a relationship between musculoskeletal posture and the amount of motor development in children. The aim of this study was to investigate this relationship in girl children aged 6 to 9 years old.

Methodology: 293 girl children aged 6 to 9 years old with mean age of 8 ± 0.950 were randomly selected to participate in this study. The musculoskeletal posture was evaluated using plummet, matrix shit, mirror box and New York test scoring form. TGMD3 test was committed with six sub-tests of locomotor and seven sub-tests of ball skills to measure the motor development of children. To examine data normality, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was performed and Spearman correlation coefficient and linear regression were used to analyze data in SPSS software (version 22.0).

Results: The results indicated that uneven shoulder, hallux valguse, forward head and genu varum have the highest prevalence among the subjects with 63%, 50%, 26% and 24%, respectively. The mean scores of gross motor development test were 56.81 ± 11. There was also a weak positive correlation between TGMD3 and New York test scores, which was not significant (sig = 0.68, r = 0.24).

Discussion: According to the findings, it can be stated that the most of children have at least single conditional abnormality and regarding the mean score of motor development, the subjects were in moderate level in terms of gross motor development. In addition, the relationship between musculoskeletal posture and gross motor development may be significant in higher number of samples and requires further and more extensive study.