Prevalence of Oropharyngeal Dysphagia and Its Predictive Factors in Patients with Neurological Diseases and Head and Neck Surgery

Dysphagia is a common disease and growing concern in various groups of patients, such as neurology and head and neck surgery. Despite the high prevalence of dysphagia and its serious complications, a major cause of mortality in these patients, it is often overlooked in the clinical evaluation of patients. Since dysphagia screening and prevention is an important step towards ensuring patient safety, improving the quality of care, reducing mortality, and improving the quality of life in different patient groups. This issue should be addressed in hospitals and related clinics. Nowadays, with the use of prevalence studies, the complications caused by dysphagia disorder can be prevented in different aspects of the patient's life. In addition, healthcare providers and therapists can identify these patients and provide appropriate healthcare services using information from these studies. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the frequency and predictors of oropharyngeal dysphagia in neurology and head and neck surgery patients.

This cross–sectional study was descriptive and analytical. We examined 500 patients admitted to Hamadan City (West of Iran) medical centers and the dysphagia clinic of Iran Rehabilitation Sciences School. All patients participating in this study were selected by purposive sampling. In this study, the Mini–Mental State Exam screening test was performed to ensure no linguistic or cognitive impairment. In addition, the Gugging Swallowing Screen test, an expert–oriented tool, was used to confirm the dysphagia. In this study, the independent t test and Chi–square test were used to assess the demographic variables of age and sex and logistic regression analysis to determine dysphagia predictors. It should be noted that the study's findings were analyzed using SPSS software at a significant level of 0.05.

A total of 40 patients (17.39%) were suffering from dysphagia. Also, there was a significant difference between the mean scores of their GUSS test and those without dysphagia (p<0.001). However, there was no significant difference between the mean age of patients with dysphagia and those without dysphagia (p=0.457). In addition, there was no significant difference between the patients with dysphagia regarding gender (p=0.090). In addition, logistic regression analysis showed that gender (95% CI: 0.9–4.1; OR=2.02) and etiology (95% CI: 0.06–0.5; OR=0.19) were predictors of dysphagia in this group of patients.

Dysphagia disorder is common in patients with neurology and head and neck surgery. In addition, etiology and gender are the predictors of dysphagia in them.