mozhgan asadi

Children with cerebral palsy (CP) are at a heightened risk of developing feeding and swallowing disorders, which are influenced by a variety of medical, cultural, psychosocial, and nutritional factors. The prevalence rates of these disorders vary widely across different studies, highlighting the complexity and multifaceted nature of these challenges.

This study aimed to determine the prevalence of feeding and swallowing disorders and to explore the factors associated with the severity of swallowing issues in Iranian children with CP.

A cross-sectional study was conducted with a convenience sample of 111 Iranian children with CP. The study assessed feeding and swallowing problems through clinical evaluations and parental reports. Data analysis was performed using IBM SPSS version 20, utilizing chi-square and Spearman's correlation coefficient tests.

The study found that feeding and swallowing problems are common among Iranian children with CP, with 79.2% of children having feeding disorders and 78.3% experiencing swallowing difficulties. Of particular concern, 40.5% of the children showed issues during the pharyngeal phase of swallowing, and 12.6% exhibited unsafe swallowing patterns. There were significant correlations between the severity of swallowing issues and several factors: Malnutrition (P ≤ 0.001), gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) (P = 0.007), motor impairment (P ≤ 0.001), and caregiver concern (P ≤ 0.001). Malnutrition was found in 60% of the children, yet only 23% were receiving dietary supplements, and a mere 2.7% were using tube feeding.

Feeding and swallowing disorders, along with malnutrition, are highly prevalent in Iranian children with CP. The positive correlation between the severity of swallowing issues and malnutrition underscores the critical need for early, multidisciplinary interventions to address these challenges.

This study conducts a comparative analysis of the temporal facets of velopharyngeal coarticulation in Persian-speaking adults, differentiating between subjects with and without cleft palate, across three distinct vowel contexts.

The study included 14 adults who had undergone cleft palate repair, with or without cleft lip and presented moderate to severe hypernasality. Another 14 adults without cleft palate were included in the study. The age range of participants was 18 to 50 years. By utilizing the Praat software, version 6.1.50, the study obtained data for the four temporal parameters by analyzing acoustic waveforms and spectrograms within three distinct vowel contexts. The analysis included the calculation of ratios of nasalization duration to neutralize the influence of speech rate variations between the cleft palate and control groups.

The results revealed that adults with cleft palate exhibited significantly extended durations for the four temporal parameters compared to the control group (P<0.001).

The findings underscore that adults with cleft palate demonstrate prolonged nasalization durations in their speech, signifying potential temporal disparities in velopharyngeal coarticulation. This divergence is most evident in the context of the /i/ vowel. The temporal aspects of nasalization, denoting the temporal dimensions of the acoustic impedance related to the oral and nasal cavities, can potentially impact the hypernasality perception in adults with cleft palate. This study proposed that an acoustic examination of speech’s temporal aspects can effectively quantify the degree of nasalization in cleft palate individuals and a control group. Furthermore, the results indicate that the development of motor speech control significantly contributes to the mechanisms underpinning anticipatory and carryover velopharyngeal coarticulation.

Premature infants (born before 37 weeks of gestational age) frequently experience feeding difficulties due to underdeveloped oral motor skills and poor chewing, swallowing, and breathing coordination. In order to improve oral feeding efficiency in these infants, Oral-Motor Stimulation (OMS) has been used in various studies. This systematic review study will aim to assess the effectiveness of OMS for oral feeding in preterm infants.

The authors will follow the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. They will conduct a search in electronic databases, including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials in The Cochrane Library (CENTRAL), Medline via PubMed, and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) for nursing and related healthcare texts without language restrictions from the first month of 1991 to the fifth month of 2024 to achieve the study objectives. All Randomized Controlled Clinical Trials (RCT) examining the effect of OMS on oral feeding in preterm infants will be included in this study.

The primary outcome of this systematic review will be oral feeding, and the secondary outcomes will include duration of hospitalization, weight gain, and feeding efficiency. Two independent reviewers will select and extract data for the study. The Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool (RoB2) will be used to evaluate potential biases in the study. Publication bias will be evaluated using funnel plots, Begg’s, and Egger’s tests. The degree of heterogeneity among the studies will be assessed using the I2 statistic and the χ2 test. Analyses of subgroups will also be carried out. All meta-analyses will be conducted using Stata V.14.

This systematic review protocol for preterm infants will aim to promote evidence-based decision-making and support the development of clinical practice guidelines in preterm feeding.

Context: 

One aspect of spoken language skills is vocabulary, which provides a basis for acquiring other language aspects. Assessing a child's vocabulary knowledge aids in identifying the child's language strengths and weaknesses and predicts reading ability and academic success. Speech-language pathologists frequently employ various procedures in clinical and research settings to assess the children's language skills and help make decisions about diagnosis, eligibility for services, and intervention.

This systematic review investigated currently available vocabulary tests developed or adapted for Iranian Persian-speaking children.

Data Sources: 

Based on the PRISMA guideline, electronic searches of three national (SID, Irandoc, and Magiran) and four international (ScienceDirect, ProQuest, PubMed, and Google scholar) databases were carried out from 2000 to 2022 to identify Persian vocabulary assessment tools. Study Selection: Search in the reference lists of papers, unpublished theses, and content of related journals also supplemented the database searches. Data Extraction: The psychometric properties of these tests were reviewed based on specific criteria used in the literature. The papers and test manuals were examined according to these criteria.

Eight tools have been developed or adapted for assessing vocabulary knowledge in Iranian Persian-speaking children. Reviewing the content and psychometric properties of the included tools indicated that the Test of Language Development- Primary:3 (TOLD-P:3) is the only accessible published tool with the most reported psychometric evidence. It measures language development in children; however, it is a multi-modal test that includes vocabulary subtests.

This review revealed that most of the reviewed tools were in the primitive stages of test development or adaptation procedures and did not examine many psychometric properties. As a result, vocabulary is a field that requires more attention because there is no accessible, standardized tool with adequate psychometric properties.

Teachers are a large group of professional voice users who are exposed to many voice problems. Vocal warm-up exercises (VWUE) can prepare the muscles involved in vocalization before teaching and can reduce voice damage in teachers. However, limited studies have examined the effects of VWUE on teachers' voices. Therefore, the present study was conducted to investigate the immediate effects of VWUE on the acoustic and perceptual characteristics of the teachers' voices.

The present study was a pretest-posttest within a group design study. A total of 20 teachers aged 18-45 with at least 5 years of teaching experience participated in the study and received VWUE for 30-45 minutes. VWUE included stretching the sternocleidomastoid, trapezius, and mylohyoid muscles, open-mouth, and yawn-sigh technique, glottal fry, tongue trills, resonance exercises, and performing ascending and descending tones. Outcome measurements included auditory-perceptual evaluation using CAPE-V and assessment of acoustic parameters with fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer, and harmonic to noise ratio.

After VWUE, a significant improvement was observed in acoustic parameters including decreasing jitter and shimmer and increasing the harmonic to noise ratio during the vowel /ɑ/ sustaining (P<0.05). Also, no significant change was found in the fundamental frequency of teachers' voices (P>0.05). In addition, VWUE resulted in a statistically significant improvement and reduction in the overall severity of voice disorder during vowel sustaining and connected speech tasks (P<0.05).

The present study can provide primary evidence of the immediate and positive effects of VWUE on teachers' voices. However, due to the lack of a control group in our study, the positive results of VWUE should be interpreted with more caution, and stronger studies with a control group are recommended in the future.

Strenuous endurance training compromises the antioxidant defenses of the body and attempts to find supplements to heal gastric ulcers induced by strenuous endurance training are increasing.

Therefore, the current study aimed at investigating the effects of curcumin supplementation during nine weeks of endurance training on gastric antioxidant capacity (superoxide dismutase; SOD) and lipid peroxidation (malondialdehyde; MDA) of serum in male Wistar rats.

The current applied research was conducted on 26 male Wistar rats aged nine weeks and weighed 215.87 ± 20.49 g. After one week of acclimation to training, the rats were randomly assigned to four groups: the control, curcumin, endurance, and endurance + curcumin. During the nine weeks (five sessions per week), the rats performed an incremental endurance training (up to 70 minutes at 35 m/minute), and the curcumin supplement at 30 mg/kg of body weight was injected intraperitoneally three times per week. SOD activity was assayed by the spectrophotometric method, and serum MDA level was measured utilizing the thiobarbituric acid reactive substances. For data analysis, ANOVA was employed using SPSS version 24.

The results of the study revealed that strenuous endurance training significantly reduced the activity of the gastric SOD enzyme (P < 0.05) and increased serum MDA level (P < 0.05), while curcumin supplementation increased gastric SOD enzyme activity, decreased serum MDA level, and resulted in the restoration of antioxidant defenses.

Prolonged strenuous endurance training induces oxidative stress to gastric tissue, and curcumin supplementation restores the antioxidant defense of the gastric tissue and body.

Professionals need a multidisciplinary approach to manage oropharyngeal dysphagia (OPD). Each team member should be aware of the signs and symptoms of OPD and collaborate with other team members to reach an optimum outcome. This study aimed to evaluate the knowledge and attitude of Iranian physicians regarding dysphagia and speech and language therapy roles in the management of dysphagia.   In this nonexperimental descriptive study, 133 physicians filled a researcher-made questionnaire entailing three sections, each of which recorded the participants’ demographic information, OPD knowledge (23 items), and attitude toward OPD (5 items).   Iranian physicians correctly answered 70.3% of the questions indicating that they had a moderate level of knowledge on OPD. However, only 53% of the physicians referred their patients to speech-language pathologists, and almost 50% of them reported a significant recovery after speech therapy in their patients.   It seems that Iranian physicians need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to manage OPD. Achievement of sufficient knowledge on the pathology of OPD, along with collaboration with other team members, can improve the outcome for patients with OPD.

One of the relatively common symptoms in non-fluent aphasia is agrammatism. Agrammatism is characterized with low syntactic complexity and deficits in verb inflection, especially tense markers. Verbs as the main core of sentences in the Persian language have vital functions for people to have effective communication.

The current study aimed at evaluating the effect of morphosemantic method on verb-tense inflection in Persian-speaking patients with aphasia and agrammatism.

Morphosemantic treatment was conducted in five stages in a case report study. The material was 46 black and white line-drawing pictures related to 23 verbs including 10 training, 10 expansion, and three exemplar verbs drawn in present and past tenses. In three phases, the percentage of correct verb inflection in the training and expansion verbs was measured and also the graph examination of level, slope of trend, and C statistic, 2-standard deviation band, effect size (percentage of non-overlapping data), and d statistic were used to analyze the data.

Both participants demonstrated significant changes in training and expansion verbs during therapeutic sessions in comparison with the baseline. The effect of therapy was maintained for a three-week follow-up.

Therapy for verb inflection in spontaneous speech is clinically important. The current study demonstrated that morphosemantic method can be successfully used for tense marker deficits in Persian-speaking patients with aphasia and agrammatism.

Teachers often speak to high volume for a long time both in the noisy environments and in the stressful situations; therefore, their tissue of vocal cords are exposed to damage. The voice problems may have the adverse impacts on the quality of education, employment, economic and communicative conditions and also on the emotional status. In this study, the effects of voice problems on the teachers’ job performance communication, social and emotional status were investigated through comparing the teachers’ knowledge with/without dysphonia from their voice problems. This study was conducted on 243 teachers at primary schools. The participants on the basis of response to the four – choice items and in relation to the rate of his/her voice problems (always, often, sometimes and rarely) were divided into two groups with/without voice problems (VP = always and often) and lack of voice ones (NVP = sometimes and rarely). To collect the data, the questionnaire with α = 0.91 was used, and to investigate the relationship between the voice problems and the performance of teachers. The findings showed that the voice problems among the teachers had a significant relationship with teaching, job attitude, ability for communication, social ability and their emotions (P The teachers with voice problems compared with those without voice ones have more difficulties in job performance, communication, social and emotional status and also in their quality of life. In fact, these problems need to be considered in evaluating and treating the voice disorders

Voice problem is a condition among primary school teachers, which may not only affect their social and emotional relationship with students, also the quality of their education and occupation. Therefore, in this study we aimed to assess the risk factors causing voice problems in primary school teachers, those with or without voice problems. 243 questionnaires were distributed among primary school teachers. Based on their vocal complaints, they were divided into two groups of with and without voice problems. Risk factors for vocal problems related to occupation and medical profiles and life style were statistically compared between two groups, using Chi-square and Fisher tests and uni-variate and multi-variate logistic regressions. The results showed that sex, marital status, employment history, loudness of voice, dust in class, drug use, esophageal reflux, anxiety, allergies, hormonal disorders and larynx surgery were possible causes of suffering from vocal disorders in teachers (P<0.05). Multiple logistic regression also showed that the habit of speaking loud, anxiety and allergies were the most potent risk factors (with the order of 4.3 and 3 times) in developing voice problems. Based on this study, since the habit of speaking loud, anxiety and allergies are the most important risk factors in developing the voice problems among primary school teachers, it seems essential that the education providing authorities and speech therapists to be aware of these hazards and provide a proper management plan to control and minimize the environmental and personal risk factors causing vocal problems in school teachers.

The Dysphagia Handicap Index (DHI) is one of the instruments used for measuring a dysphagic patient’s self-assessment. In some ways, it reflects the patient’s quality of life. Although it has been recognized and widely applied in English speaking populations, it has not been used in its present forms in Persian speaking countries. The purpose of this study was to adapt a Persian version of the DHI and to evaluate its validity, consistency, and reliability in the Persian population with oropharyngeal dysphagia. Some stages for cross-cultural adaptation were performed, which consisted in translation, synthesis, back translation, review by an expert committee, and final proof reading. The generated Persian DHI was administered to 85 patients with oropharyngeal dysphagia and 89 control subjects at Zahedan city between May 2013 and August 2013. The patients and control subjects answered the same questionnaire 2 weeks later to verify the test-retest reliability. Internal consistency and test-retest reliability were evaluated. The results of the patients and the control group were compared. The Persian DHI showed good internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients range from 0.82 to 0.94). Also, good test-retest reliability was found for the total scores of the Persian DHI (r=0.89). There was a significant difference between the DHI scores of the control group and those of the oropharyngeal dysphagia group (P‹0.001). The Persian version of the DHI achieved Face and translation validity. This study demonstrated that the Persian DHI is a valid tool for self-assessment of the handicapping effects of dysphagia on the physical, functional, and emotional aspects of patient life and can be a useful tool for screening and treatment planning for the Persian-speaking dysphagic patients, regardless of the cause or the severity of the dysphagia.

Semantic Feature Analysis was designed to improve lexical retrieval of aphasic patients via activation of semantic networks of the words. In this approach, the anomic patients are cured with semantic information to assist oral naming. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of Semantic Feature Analysis treatment on anomia of two nonfluent aphasic patients. A single-subject study with ABA design was applied to two Persian-speaking patients with chronic nonfluent aphasia. Assessment, baseline, ntervention and maintenance phases were carried out respectively during 6 weeks. A picture naming task which was made up of pictures with high name- agreement comprising 12 target, 18 non-treated control and 5 easy words was used for probes and intervention. Intervention was performed in 5 successive days, 60 minutes per session. Descriptive statistics, level, trend & slope analyses, C and d statistics were used for data analysis. Both participants revealed statistically significant improvements in naming target words. Some generalizations to control words was also occured. A minimal decrease in naming of target words was observed in maintenance phase but the naming ability was still above the baseline. The therapy maintenance effect size for both patients were obtained as medium. The findings of the current study seems to confirm Semantic Feature Analysis as an effective intervention for improving naming ability of Persian- speaking aphasic patients.