The Comparison of Malocclusion Prevalence Between Children with Cerebral Palsy and Healthy Children.

This study sets out to examine the prevalence of malocclusion and habits in a group of children with cerebral palsy and to compare it with a control group of healthy children. The presence of an anterior open bite was statistically significantly higher in the cerebral palsied group. The presence of aposterior crossbite was not significantly different between the examined groups, as was the case for a lingual crossbite. The occurrence of visceral swallowing, incompetent lips and oral respiration was significantly higher in the cerebral palsied group. The current study cannot satisfactorily sustain the issue of a higher prevalence of posterior and lingual crossbite in children with cerebral palsy because of no significant differences between groups, but it certainly can for an anterior openbite. The present study also adds to the evidence that there is an increased prevalence of oral breathing, visceral swallowing and lip incompetence in children with cerebral palsy.

Minor physical anomalies in children with hearing impairment and normal controls.

The aim of this research was to assess differences in the frequency of individual minor physical anomalies (MPA) between healthy controls and children with hearing impairment (HI) and to find out whether some MPAs are more informative in discriminating between two groups than cumulative Waldrop's scores. The aim was also to investigate the influence of gender on MPA in children with HI and those with normal hearing (NH). The study was carried out on a sample of 424 children (121 children with hearing impairment (82 boys and 39 girls) aged from 5 to 18 and 303 healthy schoolchildren with normal hearing (152 boys and 151 girls) aged from 8 to 16). In HI children, the mean value of MPA was 2.2 times higher than in the controls. Binary Logistic Regression Model is entirely (with all 18 predictors) statistically significant, that is, it recognizes partial deafness. The comparisons between the studied groups of boys and girls HI and boys and girls NH showed a higher relative involvement of MPA in boys than in girls. MPA comparison of HI boys versus NH boys and HI girls versus NH girls according to topographic regions revealed that for HI children there were higher mean scores than for the same-sex controls from all regions, but differences are particularly pronounced in the ear and tongue region. However and that the difference is statistically significant for the majority of regions but this difference tended to be more pronounced in girls with relatively better expressed peripheral dysmorphia in the former and craniofacial dysmorphia in the latter. From the obtained results, it can be seen that in HI children, common etiological factors were probably in effect leading to physical anomalies and hearing impairments. Given the present findings of increased MPAs in HI children, further investigations are necessary to determine whether these developmental abnormalities arise from genetic factors or as a consequence of environmental influences.