preview

Parkinson's Disease: Executive Summary

Decent Essays

Ramig and colleagues (2001) performed a study to examine the long-term effects of using Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT) to improve vocal function in individuals with Parkinson’s Disease (PD). Ramig and colleagues (2001) compared LSVT to received respiratory therapy (RET) to control for extraneous variables. Subjects were recruited from a variety of sources which helped to reduce recruitment bias (Ramig et al., 2001). Individuals with any laryngeal pathology unrelated to PD were excluded from the study (Ramig et al., 2001). All 33 subjects were stratified based on: age, time post-diagnosis, stage of disease, score on the unified Parkinson’s disease rating scale, and clinical ratings on speech and voice severity (Ramig et al., 2001). Subjects were then randomly divided into 2 groups and received either LSVT or RET provided in four one-hour weekly sessions for four weeks (Ramig et al., 2001). …show more content…

Evaluation of vocal function was determined by acoustically analyzing vocal loudness (recorded as sound pressure level) and inflection (recorded as semitone standard deviation). The average sound pressure level (SPL) and semitones standard deviation (STSD) of each group on all tasks were obtained and the differences between the means were statistically analyzed using a two-factor repeated measures ANOVA (Ramig et al., 2001). Data was collected by a primary investigator that did not administer treatment and was blind to which treatment group each subject was in (Ramig et al., 2001). In order to determine measurement reliability, 20% of the data obtained were reanalyzed and it was found that “repeated measures of SPL and STSD data yielded correlation coefficients greater than 0.97” (Ramig et al., 2001, p.

Get Access