Outcome of laryngeal manual therapy in four Dutch adults with persistent moderate-to-severe vocal hyperfunction: a pilot study.

A relatively new management strategy for the treatment of voice disorders is the use of laryngeal manual therapy. The main purpose of the present pilot study is to document the outcome of vocal quality after a well-defined laryngeal manual therapy (LMT) program. Four Dutch professional voice users with a persistent moderate or severe muscle tension dysphonia were studied pretreatment (1 week before LMT) and posttreatment (1 week) after completion of manual therapy (25 sessions). These subjects had received several months of traditional voice therapy, without any success. To measure and compare, the effect of LMT objective and subjective assessment techniques were used. Perceptual voice assessment included a perceptual rating of the voice using the GRBAS scale. Furthermore, the vocal quality in this population was modeled by means of the Dysphonia Severity Index (DSI). All of the subjects selected for LMT showed improvement in perceptual vocal quality and DSI values. As the DSI is a weighted variable including aerodynamic and acoustic measures, small improvements (closer to 5) are very indicative of vocal quality improvement. The use of LMT in professional voice users with persistent moderate-to-severe muscle tension dysphonia, especially in some subjects who have not responded to traditional voice therapy, is supported by this pilot study.