Systematic Review: Non-Instrumental Swallowing and Feeding Assessments in Pediatrics

Abstract

There is a high incidence of parental reporting of abnormal swallowing and feeding function and the negative impacts thereof on children. As such there is a need for well validated assessments in the area of pediatric swallowing and feeding. While instrumental assessments are well validated, there is limited information available to guide the selection and use of non-instrumental assessments for swallowing and feeding function. The aim of this study was to identify and report on non-instrumental assessments available to clinicians for pediatric swallowing and/or feeding function in order to support clinical decision making. A systematic literature search was performed by two independent reviewers using Medline and Embase databases, to find non-instrumental assessments for pediatric swallowing and feeding function. Published assessments were also included in the study by searching well-known publishers and relevant feeding and swallowing textbooks. Assessments were summarized and evaluated according to respondent type, target populations, assessment design, domains of assessment and scoring. Thirty assessments were included in the final review. All assessments had either caregiver or clinician respondents. There was high variability in target populations, assessment designs and areas of assessment. Twenty-four of the 30 assessments did not provide instruction for scoring or interpreting scores. There is high variability among the many assessments available to clinicians in the area of feeding and swallowing function in pediatrics. There appears to be limited information available on the validity and reliability of these assessments. Thus, most assessments need to be used with caution. Further research is needed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the assessments.

Patient Adherence to Dysphagia Recommendations: A Systematic Review

“…(24–32) The remaining three studies included patients who were diagnosed with dysphagia of varied etiologies. (17, 33, 34) These etiologies were the following: stroke, hemilaryngectomy, cerebral spinal surgery;(33) Parkinson disease, airway malignancy, Huntington disease, motor neuron disease, Alzheimer’s disease, muscular dystrophy, tetraplegia, poliomyelitis;(17) brain lesion, deconditioning, unspecified neuromuscular or neurodegenerative disease, local structural lesion;(34) and cardiovascular accident.…”

“…(17, 33) Studies were conducted in various settings, with all but one(17) in a hospital-based setting. Of these hospital based studies, many were administering outpatient treatments,(24–32)one included both inpatient and outpatients(34), and one with just inpatients. (33) The one study not conducted in a hospital setting incorporated a variety of settings including patients living at home, in institutional or rehab settings and hospital inpatients.…”

“…One study(17) reported an age range and divided mean between two groups, another study(34) only reported mean age, and two others reported mean age and standard deviation rather than range and average age. (31, 32) One study(27) did not report an age range or mean. Including all studies that reported the age range and mean,(24–26, 28–30, 33) the collective age range for this review was 21–94, and the mean was 60.4 years.…”

“…Two studies(31, 32) used a randomized control design, earning the highest JAMA rating of 1. One study(29) used a prospective cohort study design with a JAMA rating of 2.…”

Test-Retest and Inter-Rater Reliability Study of the Schedule for Oral-Motor Assessment in Persian Children

“…Nowadays, due to appropriate therapeutic techniques, more children and adults are being survived from medical accidents. Thus, swallowing disorders have higher rate of prevalence among children and adults particularly in disabled populations than that of normal adults [5][6][7][8].…”