Indirect vs Direct Voice Therapy for Children With Vocal Nodules
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Importance: Benign vocal fold nodules affect 12% to 22% of the pediatric population, and 95% of otolaryngologists recommend voice therapy as treatment. However, no randomized clinical trials that we are aware of have shown its benefits. Objective: To determine the impact of voice therapy in children with vocal fold nodules according to pretherapy and posttherapy scores on the Pediatric Voice-Related Quality of Life (PVRQOL) survey; secondary objectives included changes in phonatory parameters. Design, Setting, and Participants: For this multicenter randomized clinical trial, 114 children ages 6 to 10 years with vocal fold nodules, PVRQOL scores less than 87.5, and dysphonia for longer than 12 weeks were recruited from outpatient voice and speech clinics. This age range was identified because these patients have not experienced pubertal changes of the larynx, tolerate stroboscopy, and cooperate with voice therapy. Participants were blinded to treatment arm. Interventions: Participants received either indirect or direct therapy for 8 to 12 weeks. Indirect therapy focused on education and discussion of voice principles, while direct treatment used the stimulus, response, antecedent paradigm. Main Outcomes and Measures: The primary outcome measure was PVRQOL score change before and after treatment. Secondary phonatory measures were also compared. Results: Overall, 114 children were recruited for study (mean [SD] age, 8 [1.4] years; 83 males [73%]); with 57 randomized to receive either indirect or direct therapy. Both direct and indirect therapy approaches showed significant differences in PVRQOL scores pretherapy to posttherapy. The mean increase in PVRQOL score for direct therapy was 19.2, and 14.7 for indirect therapy (difference, 4.5; 95.3% CI, -10.8 to 19.8). Of 44 participants in the direct therapy group, 27 (61%) achieved a clinically meaningful PVRQOL improvement, compared with 26 of 49 (53%) for indirect therapy (difference, 8%; 95% CI, -12 to 28). Post hoc stratification showed robust effects in the direct therapy group for older children (Cohen d = 0.50) and the latter two-thirds of participants (Cohen d = 0.46). Vocal fold nodules reduced in size in 31% (22 of 70) and completely resolved in 11% (8 of 70) of participants who consented to a second set of images after going through the recruitment process. Conclusions and Relevance: Both direct and indirect voice therapy improved voice-related quality of life in children with vocal fold nodules, although there was no significant difference between approaches. Future studies may focus upon which voice therapy approaches are effective in treating age-defined populations. Trial Registration: clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT01255735.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it