OBJECTIVE: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect of pursed-lip breathing (PLB) on cardiac autonomic modulation in individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) while at rest. METHODS: Thirty-two individuals were allocated to one of two groups: COPD (n = 17; 67.29 +/- 6.87 years of age) and control (n = 15; 63.2 +/- 7.96 years of age). The groups were submitted to a two-stage experimental protocol. The first stage consisted of the characterization of the sample and spirometry. The second stage comprised the analysis of cardiac autonomic modulation through the recording of R-R intervals. This analysis was performed using both nonlinear and linear heart rate variability (HRV). In the statistical analysis, the level of significance was set to 5% (p </= 0.05). RESULTS: PLB promoted significant increases in the SD1, SD2, RMSSD and LF (ms(2)) indices as well as an increase in alpha1 and a reduction in alpha2 in the COPD group. A greater dispersion of points on the Poincare plots was also observed. The magnitude of the changes produced by PLB differed between groups. CONCLUSION: PLB led to a loss of fractal correlation properties of heart rate in the direction of linearity in patients with COPD as well as an increase in vagal activity and impact on the spectral analysis. The difference in the magnitude of the changes produced by PLB between groups may be related to the presence of the disease and alterations in the respiration rate.