PURPOSE: to relate respiratory characteristics with cognitive-linguistic skills performance of children from a public school of the region of Belo Horizonte. METHOD: a cross-sectional, observational and descriptive study. From the 180 enrolled children, 131 met the inclusion and exclusion criteria. We evaluated 66 children in the 4th grade and 65 children in the 3rd grade of the elementary education, from both genders, with ages going between nine and ten year old. We utilized a questionnaire for assessment of respiratory characteristics and a previously published protocol and adapted to the Brazilian population in order to assess the cognitive-linguistic skills. Data were analyzed using the Mann-Whitney and Kruskal Wallis test at a significance level of 1%. RESULTS: there was not observed a p-value <0.01 in comparison between the respiratory characteristics and the cognitive-linguistic skills’ score obtained by each series. We observed that 59.1% of students had scores in a questionnaire for assessment of respiratory characteristics between zero and four points, indicating some impairment in respiratory variables studied. We obtained a significant p value for comparisons between the performance in cognitive-linguistic skills and the presence of respiratory disorders in the studied series. CONCLUSION: no significant relationship was found between the performance of cognitive-linguistic skills and the presence of respiratory characteristics in students from the same public school of Belo Horizonte city, and the children who showed respiratory changes didn´t have performance below those without these changes in the assessed skills.
Learning; Education Status; Learning Disorders; Mouth Breathing
