Effects of Brief and Intensive Therapy for Dysphagia in Patients with Head and Neck Cancer during Radio-Chemotherapy: A Pilot Study

Author Info

Elana de Menezes Rossetto Luísa Bello Gabriel Bárbara Luísa Simonetti Vera Beatris Martins Monalise Costa Batista Berbert

Corresponding Author

Elana de Menezes Rossetto
Department of Speech Language Pathology, Universidade Federal de Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre (UFCSPA), Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

A B S T R A C T

Objective: To verify the effectiveness of a Brief and Intensive Dysphagia Therapy programme, in patients with head and neck cancer, during radio-chemotherapy. Study Design: This is a randomized clinical trial - pilot project with a random sample consisting of 11 patients divided into two groups: 7 in the intervention group, who received brief and intensive therapy and 4 in the control group, with weekly therapy. The assessment instruments used were tongue pressure measurement, mouth-opening measures, oral intake scale and quality of life questionnaire. Patients were evaluated before radio-chemotherapy, after 15 days of speech therapy and after radio-chemotherapy. Results: The intervention group presented higher values of lingual apex pressure (p = 0.00), mouth opening maintenance from the second evaluation (35.14 ± 16.82 mm) until the end of the radio-chemotherapy (35.29 p± 5.93 mm), greater oral intake functionality (p = 0.00) and improvement in overall aspects of quality of life questionnaire (p = 0.05) after completion of brief and intensive therapy and radio-chemotherapy. Conclusion: Brief and intensive therapy presented superior results in the maintenance and/or rehabilitation of the swallowing mechanism in patients with head and neck cancer undergoing radio-chemotherapy.

Article Info

Article Type

Research Article

Publication history

Received: Tue 20, Sep 2022
Accepted: Tue 11, Oct 2022
Published: Mon 24, Oct 2022

Copyright

© 2023 Elana de Menezes Rossetto. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Hosting by Science Repository.
DOI: 10.31487/j.IJCST.2022.04.04