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From: Rosalee
Date: 06 Oct 2010
Time: 16:39:46 -0500
Remote Name: 65.92.23.238
Hi Tom. Thanks for your feedbac. Although the natural recovery rate can be as high as 80% in the general population, the paper presented to this conference shows the results of a group of children treated with the Lidcombe programme after age 6. These children have a longer history of stuttering and are less likely to have a natural recovery without treatment. Regarding the long term follow up studies, Miller and Guitar in a 2009 article that is in the Journal of Fluency Disorders, conducted a study of the long-term effectiveness of the Lidcombe programme. In this study the treatment was administered by clinicians who were newly trained in the approach in a clinic independent of the developers of the programme. A major finding of the study was that 11 of 15 children were not stuttering on follow-up. The remaining four children showed residual stuttering that was rated as ‘very mild’ or ‘mild’ on the SSI-3 scale after follow-up periods of up to nearly 5 years. I think that it is important to note that the term ‘relapse’ does not mean return to pretreatment levels in this study, but failure to meet the established criteria for Stage 2 of the Lidcombe programme that is less than 1% stuttered syllables and perceptual severity ratings that indicate none or very little stuttering. Although I agree with you that much stuttering likely has a neurobiological basis, neural plasticity during the preschool period may allow for changes in response to treatment. I am eager for the day when we will be able to produce some less invasive brain imaging studies of pre-post treatment changes in preschool age children to give us a better idea of what is actually going on during this process.