Background: The difficult airways at children happen rarely, but can lead to serious complications.
Materials and methods: Results of studying of sensitivity, specificity and predictive importance of a scale of Mallampati at 379 children aged from 3 till 17 years (ASA physical status I-II), who underwent surgery in the nasal cavity and nasopharynx, are presented in this article. Depending on result of Mallampati's score children have been distributed on 2 groups. In the first group 20 children had predictions of the difficult intubation of a trachea, 19 of them had the 3rd degree by Mallampati, 1 child had the 4th degree by Mallampati. In the second group 370 children had 1-2 class on Mallampati scale. During direct laryngoscopy, 8 patients had 3 degree on Cormack & Lehane and the 382 patients had 1-2 degree on Cormack & Lehane. The degree of the laryngoscopy's difficulty determine by results of the Mallampati Samsoon & Young.
Results and conclusion: It is found out that sensitivity (Se) of a scale of Mallampati in modification of Samsoon & Young at children at operations in the nasal cavity and nasopharynx of 50%, specificity (Sp) of 96%, the positive predictive value (+VP) of 20%, the negative predictive value (-VP) of 99%.