4 Clinical Trials for Various Conditions
The goal of this clinical trial is to create a vocal health database of people aged 4-17 with no diagnosed voice pathology. The main question it aims to answer is: * what is the best way to assess pediatric voices; and, * what are the differences between healthy and dysphonic pediatric voices? Participants will complete one 60 minute session involving one of three types of aerodynamic interruption.
The long-term goal is to transform the diagnosis and treatment of dysphonia by elucidating cervical and cranial neuromuscular mechanisms underlying typical and disordered voicing. The overall objective of this application is to propose and evaluate a novel objective spectrotemporal diagnostic tool measuring functional cervical-cranial muscle network activity in typical and disordered speakers.The purpose of this study is to improve our understanding of how the vocal tract and the muscles of the larynx and the head work at baseline and after vocal fatigue.
The proposed series addresses the prevention and treatment of voice problems in teachers. Data in the literature clearly identify voice disorders as teachers' primary occupational risk not only in the U.S. but also internationally. Moreover, voice problems constitute a global women's health concern. Until recently, few reports have been available around the treatment of these problems in teachers, and even fewer have addressed the equally important question of prevention. The present studies are conducted within the context of a long-range goal to identify effective intervention methodologies for both the prevention and treatment of voice problems in teachers taking into consideration multicultural and linguistic factors. The present studies will report pragmatic data around the effectiveness of two theoretically-driven approaches to the prevention and treatment of voice problems in teachers, (a) voice hygiene education (VH) and (b) voice hygiene education + voice production training in "resonant voice" (VH+VP, essentially the Lessac-Madsen Resonant Voice Therapy program). Participants will be student teachers in Pittsburgh and Hong Kong, who will be followed from student teaching across their second full year of employment as a professional teacher. The central aims are: \[1\] to evaluate the effectiveness of VH and VH+VP for the prevention of future voice problems in student teachers who are vocally healthy at the outset of the protocol, versus the treatment of voice problems in student teachers who already have them at some level; \[2\] to evaluate the generality of the findings across teachers in the U.S. and China, using appropriate linguistic and cultural adaptations of the interventions; and \[3\] to evaluate the feasibility of an internet-based voice exercise and reporting program as a supplement to face-to-face interventions. Ergonomic and personal factors will also be evaluated for their differential ability to predict the risk for future voice problems in teachers. The results should be useful at a practical level, and should also lay the groundwork for future studies assessing similar issues around the prevention of voice problems in teachers, in particular as influenced by multicultural factors within the U.S. The results should also be useful for future studies investigating causal pathways in interventions around these problems.
The purpose of this study is to generate a technology that will allow clinicians to prescribe behavioral treatment that should optimize tissue healing for both acute and chronic phonotrauma. In this study, we propose to (1): establish a non-invasive methodology for estimating overall mechanical dose during phonation, and component metrics of phonatory mechanical dose (e.g., distance dose, energy dissipation dose and time dose) from high speed imaging data and aeromechanical modeling, for a range of vocal fold configurations (Experiment 1); (2): identify mathematical relations between treatment dose parameters, inflammatory state of the tissue and time-varying biological consequences in the tissue, up to 2 wk following acute phonotrauma (Experiment 2); (3): develop a hybrid physical-biological model of vocal fold inflammation and treatment to identify treatment modalities that should optimize post-traumatic wound healing at 2 wk, for a range of acute phonotraumatic conditions (Experiment 3-no human subject involved), and (4): provide a preliminary test of the hybrid treatment models' ability to predict idealized treatment outcome in human subjects, and calibrate the model as needed iteratively to achieve a match between predicted and obtained outcomes (Experiment 4).