Unilateral recurrent laryngeal nerve paralysis:The importance of “preoperative” voice therapy

Documentation of progress in voice therapy: perceptual, acoustic, and laryngostroboscopic findings pretherapy and posttherapy

“…In some of them, no comparison was possible between pretherapy and posttherapy data, because no measurements had been made prior to therapy (for example, Koufman and Blalock 1 and Raabe and Pascher 2 ) Furthermore, the number of subjects studied is often too small to permit generalization of the results (for instance, Fex et al, 3 Holmberg et al, 4 and Verdolini et al 5 ). Almost all other studies published over the last two decades concern either specific groups of subjects (for example, Kitzing and Å kerlund, 6 Murry and Woodson, 7 and Heuer et al 8 ) or voice therapies in which a strict protocol was used (for example, Roy et al, 9 Bassiouny, 10 and Kotby et al 11 ). Conclusions drawn from these experiments can only apply to those groups of patients (e.g., persons with vocal nodules) or therapies involved in the studies.…”

Delayed Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve palsy following total thyroidectomy: A case report

“…Voice therapy in UVFP is typically directed at abdominal breathing and humming/ resonant voice to improve closure of the glottis, encourage abdominal breath support, and improve vocal fold function while avoiding supraglottic hyper function [10]. Significant numbers of patients with UVFP who opted for voice therapy reported vocal improvement subjectively or as measured by glottal closure, acoustic measurements, pitch range, and/or patientreported voice handicap [11,12].Interpretation of the impact of voice therapy in UVFP may be obscured by returning neurologic function [13]and it is unknown whether there is a relationship between voice therapy and neurologic recovery [10].…”

Relationship among glottal area, static supraglottic compression, and laryngeal function studies in unilateral vocal fold paresis and paralysis

“…Clinical measures that reflect this lack of closure include reduced maximum phonation times, increased translaryngeal airflow, reduced sound pressure levels, and in some instances, increased subglottic pressure as indirectly measured by intraoral pressure during production of bilabial voiceless plosives. [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] However, some subjects with vocal fold paralysis have normal laryngeal function studies. 16 In this study, we evaluated the proportion of individuals with documented unilateral vocal fold paresis or paralysis that have objective voice measures that are within normal limits and attempted to determine factors that are associated with normal laryngeal function studies.…”