Methods: A descriptive, applied, prospective, longitudinal and evaluation study was conducted with the participation of 160 children, with ages ranging from 9 to 12 years and 320 children aged 13 to 14 years from four different schools. Two subgroups for each age were established with a similar number of members. A subgroup with 80 students and another with 160 students were headed by two teachers instructed in handling students with asthma while the two remaining subgroups were headed by two teachers who did not have any knowledge about asthma. The following aspects were assessed: prevalence and severity of asthma, exercise-induced asthma, physical fitness and maximum expiratory flow at the beginning of the study and six months later.
Results:
An 18.5% prevalence of asthma was observed among the 480 students; 28.1% in children from 9 to 12 years and 13.7%. from 13 to 14 years,
In the group of asthmatic children from 9 to 12 years, significant differences were observed in favor of asthmatic students whose teacher had received instruction with regards to: decreasing the severity of asthma (p = 0.000), lower incidence of exercise-induced asthma (p = 0.0001 ), increase in the results of physical fitness tests (p = 0.009).
In the group of asthmatic children from 13 to 14 years old, statistically significant differences were also reported in favor of students whose teachers had received training with the following results: drop in exercise-induced asthma (p = 0.000116), higher values in the physical fitness tests of all students (p= 0.00000) and also in students with asthma (p= 0.009436).
At the end of the study, both groups exhibited a significant increase in the maximum expiratory flow measurements of students in the group aged 9 to 12 years (p = 0.000) and in the group aged 13 to 14 years old (p = 0, 001).
Conclusions: Teachers with knowledge about asthma had a positive impact on physical fitness and lowed exercise-induced asthma in students.