In stuttering patients, laser acupuncture treatment could
help maintaining the therapeutic effect of speech-therapy and reduce stuttering
relapsing; according to a recent clinical study which was published in the
journal of Advanced Biomedical Research.
Stuttering is a speech disorder in which sounds,
syllables or words are repeated or prolonged, disrupting the normal flow of
speech. These speech disturbance may accompanied by struggling behaviours, such
as rapid eye blinks or tremors of lips. Stuttering can make it difficult to
communicate with other people, which often affect person’s quality of life.
Although the cause of stuttering is not clear around 9% of people with a family
history of stuttering are link with genetic alternation. Stuttering may occur
after a stroke, head injury or other type of brain trauma. The common approach
for stuttering treatment is speech-therapy, which is effective in many cases but
is tend to relapse in some cases.
Recently a clinical study was conducted to assess the
effectiveness of laser acupuncture on patients with stuttering. Twenty patients
with stuttering were randomly divided into acupuncture plus speech-therapy
group (n=10) and speech-therapy alone group (n=10). Single blind laser
acupuncture was given at following acupoints: H5, LI4, P6, SI17, St9, CV23,
CV24, and EX5 for 30 seconds. Outcome measures included by the percentage of
stuttered syllables (% SS) and the speech rate based on the number of syllables
per minute (SPM), which were evaluated before, immediate after laser
acupuncture and 3 month after intervention.
It was shown that laser acupuncture enhanced effect of speech-therapy
judged by the improvement of percentage of SS and SPM compared with
speech-therapy alone treatment. Laser acupuncture helped reduce the relapsing
of stuttering 3 month after treatment compared with control group.
The study showed that in patients with stuttering laser
acupuncture improved the effect of speech-therapy and reduced relapsing of
stuttering during follow-up observation. However, more studies with bigger
sample sizes and improvement in study design are needed to confirm the
effectiveness of acupuncture on stuttering.
Reference
B Shafiei et al., Determining
the effect of laser acupuncture in treating stutterers in comparison with
speech therapy. Adv Biomed Res. 2015; 4: 8. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25625114
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