Comparison of medical and voice therapy for reflux laryngitis based on acoustic and laryngeal characteristics

Reflux laryngitis is extremely common among patients with voice disorder. Medical therapy approaches are not efficient enough. The main goal of this study is to assess the acoustic and laryngeal characteristics of patients with dysphonia before and after medical or voice therapy, and to evaluate the effectiveness of each.

In this retrospective study, 16 reflux laryngitis patients were assessed. Five received complete voice therapy, tow ceased voice therapy and nine received medication. Perceptual voice evaluation was performed by a speech-language pathologist, the severity of voice problem was calculated, based on the affected acoustic and laryngeal characteristics pre- and post-treatment.

Post-treatment evaluation in patients who received complete voice therapy indicates 80 percent improvement in the severity of disorder and 100 percent improvement in the perceptual voice evaluation. After medical therapy, we observed that voice disorder and perceptual voice evaluation are improved 44 and 66 percent respectively. The improvement was statistically significant in both treatment approaches: complete voice therapy (P=0.039) and medical therapy (p=0.017).

In patients with reflux laryngitis, most acoustic and laryngeal characteristics were normal and satisfying after the treatment. It can be concluded that the proficiency of voice therapy in improving the acoustic and laryngeal characteristics is comparable to medical therapy.