Intensive speech-language pathology therapy with adults who stutter: preliminary study

PURPOSE: To compare the results of fluency and self-perception of the impact of stuttering on the lives of adults who stutter, before and after undergoing intensive speech-language pathology therapy. METHODS: This is a descriptive and longitudinal study with data collection before and after intensive therapy in four patients who stutter. The intensive care program consisted of thirty one-hour sessions held in five individual sessions a week. Speech samples collected before and after therapy were analyzed by two fluency experts. Descriptive data analysis was performed through the frequency distribution of categorical variables and analysis of measures of central tendency and dispersion of continuous variables. The verification of agreement between the evaluations carried out by the two judges was performed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Correlation analysis was also performed using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient between the variables in the speech sample and the OASES-A scores. RESULTS: There was a reduction of the percentage of stuttering disfluencies, increasing the flow of words per minute of the participants. The descriptive analysis of the OASES-A showed a decrease in the degree of impact of stuttering on the participants' lives in all parts of the questionnaire. CONCLUSION: There was an improvement in all variables analyzed after intensive care, including an improvement in speech fluency and a reduction in the impact of stuttering on the participants' lives, which suggests the relevance of the intensive speech therapy proposal for stuttering.