2020 Volume 61 Issue 3 Pages 223-229
The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of voice therapy for patients with essential vocal tremor and try to develop a suitable voice therapy program for this disorder. Two patients were enrolled in this study. We performed a phonatory function analysis, which demonstrated that the tremor symptoms were milder when the patients spoke softly and briefly with a slightly elevated pitch. We found that an effective voice therapy technique was to weaken the activation levels of the adductor laryngeal muscles. As part of the systematic voice therapy program, we provided our patients with strategies for reducing their vocal tremor from an exaggerated vowel phonation to a normal conversational level. In both patients, compared to their pre-therapy status, their post-therapy status showed improvements in the voice handicap index (VHI) and voice-related quality of life (V-RQOL) scores, the acoustic parameters of voice, and the score of the mora method during sentence reading. This voice therapy program was not effective enough to remove the vocal tremor completely, but it could improve the patients' symptoms in regular conversation. Our suggested therapy program will prove an effective solution for voice tremor patients in the future and will provide a non-invasive treatment option for anxious patients.
