Summary:
Introduction:
diaphragmatic excursion by ultrasound is a tool that allows to properly assess the
patient with critical pathology of the airway, with pleural effusion and neurovascular injuries that
generate restrictive patterns on the chest. Performing dynamic evaluation of the diaphragm before
and after a procedure allows us to know the changes in the natural history of the disease. For this
reason, it is essential to know the normal values of the study population, and how it interferes with
the other anthropometric variables of the patients.
Materials and methods:
analytical prevalence
study for the measurement of normal excursion variables and the correlation with anthropometric
variables of patients without pulmonary or diaphragmatic pathology.
Results:
simple random
sample of 50 diaphragms with a distribution of 68% of women, with a mean age of 39 years and
a median of the abdominal perimeter of 78 cm. The thickness of the diaphragm was 3.4 mm on
inspiration and 2.6 mm on expiration, with a mean diaphragmatic excursion of 15 mm. The Kendall
correlation between the excursion and the anthropometric variables had a value of rho = 0.94.
Conclusions:
the normal values of the diaphragmatic excursion are highly variable according to the
population studied, with a clinical relationship between the anthropometric variables. This allows us
to recommend that we should always perform a dynamic assessment of the diaphragm before and
after each procedure in order to evaluate significant changes in diaphragmatic excursion values.
Key words:Diaphragm, Ultrasonics, Statistical analysis, Correlation of data