Speech impairments like dysarthria are common in children with cerebral palsy (CP) which can greatly affect participation across environments. Our study examined how speech impairment severity changes over time in 101 children with CP at 4, 6, 8, and 10 years of age.
Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder that affects how clear and understandable a person’s speech is. Between 50-90% of people with CP have dysarthria.
Drooling is an important problem for many individuals with CP and there are a number of interventions available to treat symptoms. If an individual with CP or their caregiver have concerns about drooling it is important to discuss with a health care provider. Care pathways such as the AACPDM pathway can be a starting point for shared decision making. In all cases, working together as a team is important in choosing the best alternative. Children and adults with CP may have trouble with drooling, or saliva management. In the medical world, drooling is referred to as sialorrhea. Saliva plays an important role in eating but also can interfere with airway clearance and breathing, as well as social participation. When drooling has this kind of impact it becomes important to consider intervention.
Many children with cerebral palsy (CP) have difficulty controlling saliva. Drooling varies in severity and can be distressing for the children, families and caregivers. Chronic drooling is referred to as Sialorrhea and occurs as a result of limitations in a person’s ability to control and swallow oral secretions.
When you use alternate means of communication it can be really frustrating to go out in community. It is hard to know whether people are understanding you and whether they will take the time to listen. A lot of times it's hard for people to admit that they're not always comfortable with a device or a wheelchair or person who does things differently. So the more we can expose and educate people the better off we all will be. When we talk about acceptance, we're not just talking about people in society accepting people with disabilities. We're also talking about people with disabilities who are using alternate means of communication and how difficult it is for them to be out in the community.
It's really essential to understand how brain function works to really tap into how learners learn.
Let me tell you about multimodal communication. We, as typical communicators, all use many different strategies. We use speech, gestures, facial expressions, technology, and no-tech solutions. As communicators, we all size up the situation based upon our communication partners, the context, the environment and then we choose to use the most effective communication strategy.
A speech language pathologist is someone who is trained in working with kids and adults. Everything from working with articulation errors and correcting things to what I do, which is working with people with profound physical impairments and getting them augmentative communication strategies.