Change in Nasal Resonance Over Time: A Clinical Study

Abstract

Fifteen of the 20 patients who had been judged by a speech pathologist and two surgeons to have had poor resonance following surgical treatment were recalled in order to review factors that may have been related to this poor result. In the present study, the poor-resonance patients were reanalyzed for present status given that they had received no further surgical intervention. The results indicate that over one-half of those patients now have normal resonance; this gives the patients who were repaired by the Cronin technique an 89 percent probability of achieving normal resonance. The age of the patient at the time of evaluation appears to be an important factor. Patients judged as " poor-resonance results " were more likely to be less than 5 years of age, but as they matured, judgment of " resonance " indicated improvement. KEY WORDS: resonance, change, follow-up, surgical. In a previous study, resonance results of 92 patients whose palates had been repaired for at least 1 year, using the Cronin procedure, were evaluated by two surgeons and a speech pathologist. (Aaronson, Fox, and Cronin, 1985). They concurred that 20 of the 92 displayed abnormal resonance. Analysis of the 1985 data failed to demonstrate a significant relationship between resonance results and either cleft type or age at the time of repair. However, the observation was made that a disproportionately high number of patients with abnormal resonance were below the age of 6 years. Of the 11 patients under 6 years of age in this study, eight had abnormal resonance. Since the primary criterion of successful palatal surgery is normal resonance, those patients with persisting abnormal resonance are of continuing interest; so a further review of