Voice Speech Therapy in the Aged: Exploratory Systematic Review of Literature

Abstract

Introduction: With world population life expectancy rising, comes the importance of conducting studies about aging - process which results in the decline of control mechanisms needed for daily life. The voice also suffers impacts with the progression of years, this process being known as presbyphonia. The Speech-Language Pathologist is the professional who has the knowledge to intervene in this process. Objective: Survey studies about speech therapy intervention on voice in the aged. Methods: Exploratory Systematic Review in the following data bases: LILACS. Medline and SciELO. The search was conducted using keywords related to the topic of study. Articles in Portuguese, English and Spanish were accepted, with periods between 2005 and 2014. Relevant articles were selected based on inclusion and exclusion criteria applied to the abstract and full text. Results: The electronic search ended with 1047 publications, of which 1025 were excluded in the analysis of the abstract and 15 were eligible for this study after the complete reading of the content. Discussion: The studies that composed this review describe the speech therapy intervention in the promotion, evaluation and vocal rehabilitation processes with the elderly Some researchers have failed to characterize their samples. There was no consensus about the chronological marker of senescence in these studies. Several of the analyzed articles were published in journals without impact factor. Conclusion: There was poor visibility due to the impact factor of publications, as well as low quality of evidence, highlighting the need for researches focused on speech therapy with the elderly in the voice field