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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 10/23/03
Time: 10:43:12 AM
Remote Name: 157.182.13.3
Dear Oliver,
In 1968-69, I was an examiner on a National Speech and Hearing Survey of randomly selected school children in the USA. We tested nearly 39,000 kids from grades 1-12. The *prevalence* of stuttering was 0.8% in that sample. It was higher in the earlier grades and lower in the later grades.
We talk about the "lifetime incidence" of stuttering (i.e., the percentage of people who will stutter at sometime in their lives) to be about 5%, as Luc indicates. I think that generally works, but Bobbie Lubker, who is an epidemiologist, wrote an article a few years back in the ISAD Conference (http://www.mankato.msus.edu/dept/comdis/isad2/papers/lubker.htm) which stated rather emphatically that we really don't know what the incidence of stuttering is at this time. Incidence, for epidemiologists, typically implies the *rate* of *new* occurrences of a condition among *at risk* individuals *in a given period of time*. Obviously, it is hard to know who is and who is not at risk for stuttering, but it must certainly exclude those who already stutter. It is also not clear if a former stutterer should be included in the group of at risk people.
Ken