The State of Exercise‐Based Dysphagia Intervention in the Literature: A Scoping Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Exercise-based interventions for dysphagia are frequently recommended in the clinical setting. We aim to characterize the state of the dysphagia treatment literature to provide a high-level overview on four domains: Study characteristics, patient populations, exercise characteristics, and outcome measures reported. This review acts as an initial step in analyzing the proposed gap between research and clinical practice patterns. Methods: A search strategy was executed across five databases to capture publications evaluating the impact of exercise-based interventions on swallow function. After removing duplicates, 20,583 abstracts were screened for inclusion, with 505 studies eligible for full-text review. After applying exclusionary criteria, information was extracted from 204 publications. Results: Results indicate that studies are predominantly prospective (88%) and often randomized controlled trials (44%) typically completed in the outpatient setting (59%). Most studies represent homogenous patient groups (88%) with an average age of 64 years. Exercise paradigms average 40 days in length. Forty-six target exercises are reported, with Effortful Swallow being the most common (37%). Forty percent of studies evaluate the efficacy of a single exercise in isolation, followed by a combination approach of 4+ exercises (34%) and 2-3 exercises (26%). Thirty-seven different therapeutic devices are reported. Most (65%) studies use instrumental examinations to evaluate treatment efficacy, with 52 unique methods for analysis reported. Further, over 100 unique clinical outcome measures are reported. Conclusions: This scoping review highlights many relative strengths in the dysphagia treatment literature (e.g., on parameters related to study design and outcome measures). At the same time, the findings suggest that there is significantly less literature to extrapolate to typical clinical caseloads and practice patterns with respect to patient characteristics, care settings, and exercise characteristics. Level of Evidence: I, scoping review of available evidence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".