Effectiveness of group speech therapy for patients with Machado Joseph Disease

a series of cases

Abstract

Objective: To verify the benefit of group speech therapy in speech intelligibility of patients with Machado Joseph’s disease (MJD). Methods: A series of cases was carried out, with patients seen in a speech therapy clinic for neurodegenerative adults in a referral hospital in southern Brazil. Patients with the molecular diagnosis of MJD were included. Speech recordings were performed before and after the intervention. Subsequently, the speech excerpts underwent auditory-perceptual analysis by 3 trained speech therapists and calibrated to a Kappa index ≥ 0.90, blind to speech collections and acoustic analysis in the Praat software. Speech therapy was performed in a group, consisting of four weekly sessions of fifty minutes. Each session was divided between speech exercises and guidance on strategies to optimize communication. Results: The sample consisted of 5 patients with a mean age of 39.8 years (± 16.51) and disease duration of 10 years (± 8.15). Four (80%) participants received an initial speech therapy diagnosis of mild dysarthria and one (20%) of moderate dysarthria. After the intervention, there was no improvement in the diagnosis of dysarthria, however it was found that 60% (n = 3) of the participants showed improvement in the speech motor bases: articulation, 40% (n = 2), prosody and resonance and 40% (n = 2) worsened in breathing. The acoustic analysis showed an improvement in maximum phonation time (MPT) in 3 (60%) of the 5 patients. Conclusion: Despite the little improvement in specific parameters of the acoustic analysis, there was an improvement in speech functionality from the auditory perceptual analysis, improving the speech intelligibility of this sample.