In the present study, we report the results of acoustic analysis of voice in 97 patients diagnosed with vocal nodules before and after the vocal logopedic treatment, to evaluate its effectiveness in monitoring the evolution. We analyzed five parameters: the mean fundamental frequency (F0) and its standard deviation, jitter, shimmer, and normalized noise energy (NNE). Our results indicate that most patients showed a reduction of fundamental frequency, an increase of perturbation (jitter and shimmer), and an increase of NNE before the treatment. We did not find any statistically significant relationship between previous values of the five parameters analyzed and the clinical course. We did not find significant differences between the two groups (with and without clinical improvement) in the evolution of any of the five parameters, although these differences were greater in the case of jitter. We conclude that the acoustic analysis of voice can be useful as a complementary tool in the diagnosis of vocal nodules, but the parameter values analyzed before treatment did not correlate with the clinical course and we believe that its usefulness in the evaluation of results after the vocal treatment is limited.
The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the laryngostroboscopy for monitoring the evolution of patients with functional dysphonia before and after the logopedic vocal treatment. We performed a prospective observational study of 65 dysphonic patients diagnosed of functional dysphonia, where we analyzed four stroboscopic parameters (glottal closure, vocal fold vibration, mucosal wave and phase symmetry) by a protocol based on systematic subjective evaluation of the stroboscopic images before and after the rehabilitator treatment; and the results were stratified according to the clinical course. All patients, before the treatment, had some abnormality in at least one of the four analyzed aspects. After the vocal treatment, we found improvement of the four parameters in different degrees, and we just found a statistically significant relationship between the evolution of the glottal closure and the clinical course. We believe that the laryngostroboscopy, systematized through a protocol, is a useful technique for the diagnosis of functional abnormalities in patients with functional dysphonia but it is not a very useful technique for evaluating the results after the rehabilitator treatment, as there is not a statistically significant relationship between clinical course and the change in the most stroboscopic parameters, so it shouldn't be the only technique used for these proposes.
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