Occurrence of throat related symptoms in persons’ with- and without disorder of voice

Viveka Lyberg Åhlander, Lucyna Schalén

In clinical practise, we often meet patients reporting symptoms related to throat rather than to larynx: lump in the throat, excessive throat-clearing etc. Since some of the patients do not primarily experience any voice disturbance we were interested in recording these symptoms parallel with the Voice Handicap Index (VHI). We thus created a “throat-scale” consisting of ten questions about throat-related complaints, symptoms mainly related to supraglottal parts of the vocal tract. The patients were asked to rate occurrence of their symptoms. The throat-scale was tested for reliability and validity in four groups of patients with voice disorders: phonastenia, functional dysphonia, benign vocal fold-lesions and unilateral vocal fold paresis. As reference we used two groups of patients without primary voice disorders. We believe that focusing on throat-symptoms help us to increase our understanding of the role of supraglottal part of vocal tract for the vocal function in health and disease.

Contact information:
Viveka Lyberg Åhlander
Dep. of logopedics, phoniatrics and audiology,
University Hospital, S-221 85 Lund, Sweden
Phone: +4646171756 Fax: +46171732
Viveka.Lyberg_ahlander@med.lu.se