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From: Nan Ratner
Date: 10/20/00
Time: 2:33:01 PM
Remote Name: 129.2.25.203
There has been discussion on this topic in other places during this conference, but,briefly, about 80% of children diagnosed with stuttering appear to get better, apparently without intervention. Work done by Ehud Yairi and his colleagues (look him up on pubMed or EBSCO) suggests that stuttering has its highest rate of recovery within 12-15 months of onset, and that after that, recovery rates drop, although it still happens. Ramig noted that when stuttering has persisted for a number of years, even in a young child, recovery is somewhat unlikely without intervention. Yairi also noted that, for children who would recover, tracking disfluency showed a fluctuating but declining profile across time, rather than abrupt disappearance, while chronic children showed a flat or worsening profile. Other factors identified by this team as negative prognostic indicators of recovery were: sex (boys recover less often than girls), language ability (poorer language skills yield poorer recovery rates), duration of the problem, and age of onset of symtptoms (late onset was a somewhat negative prognostic indicator.) As a recent discussion in AJSLP noted (see articles by Curlee & Yairi, and by me), these are not absolute markers, but rather factors that can be used to help parents decide whether they wish to continue to monitor a problem, using help from a clinician to palliate symptoms and prevent secondary problems from developing), or seek active intervention.
Nan