Basic Indicators of Physical Development in Children Aged 5-6 Years With Recurrent Respiratory Infections

Abstract

Background. Recently, scientific publications on various aspects of the problem of recurrent respiratory infections in preschool children have paid increasing attention to identifying influential factors contributing to frequent episodes of acute respiratory infections (ARI). In particular, these factors include significant deviations in children's physical development from standard values.
 Aim: to find out the relationship between the frequency of ARI episodes in children aged 60-83 months and their basic anthropometric indicators.
 Materials and methods. A total of 71 children (44 boys and 27 girls) aged 60-83 months, undergoing inpatient treatment on ARI, were involved in the clinical study.
 The number of ARI episodes during the previous year of their life was taken into account. Additionally, two integral indices of ARI recurrence, specifically the infection index (InI) and resistance index (RI), were calculated. The basic indicators of physical development were assessed in the children, including: 1) body weight; 2) body length; 3) body surface area; 4) body mass index; 5) chest circumference (CC); 6) integral index of dolichostenomelia. For the comparative analysis of the results obtained, the current standards of physical development indicators for children from the World Health Organization were used. The statistical processing of the digital data was performed with IBM SPSS Statistics 28 licensed software.
 Results. Rank correlation analysis and cross-tabulation did not demonstrate any interdependence between InI and RI, on the one hand, and the anthropometric indicators considered, on the other hand. Meanwhile, there was a very strong direct correlation between InI and RI (ρ=0.983; p<0.001; 95% CI: 0.972-0.989) in the examined children. Linear regression analysis revealed the dependence of InI and RI on CC size (p<0.001). At that, the degree of the impact of CC size on these clinical indices was almost the same, constituting 7.7% and 7.5%, respectively.
 Conclusion. Thus, according to the data obtained, the contribution of СС size to the susceptibility of children aged 60-83 months to recurrent respiratory infections among other potential risk factors is insignificant. However, given the widely recognized diversity of mentioned factors, the result deserves due attention. This should be accounted while developing the final integrated model for predicting the frequency of ARI episodes in preschool children.