446 Impact of Providing Physical Education Teachers with Information about Asthma When Training Children and Adolescents with This Disorder

BACKGROUND: To assess the impact of providing physical education teachers with information about asthma and the progression of this disorder when training children and adolescents with this disorder. 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 4 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 2 teachers instructed in handling students with asthma while the 2 remaining subgroups were headed by 2 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 6 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.