Trending Swallowing Resources for Dysphagia Awareness Month

By providing dysphagia services, you’re helping to prevent malnutrition and pneumonia while also improving the quality of life for your patients and their families. In recognition of Dysphagia Awareness Month, we’re presenting some recently published articles to help you keep up with new ideas and methods in swallowing services.

Dysphagia in Adults

Coordination Between Respiration and Swallowing in Patients With Dysphagia After Cervical Spinal Cord Injury: An Observational Case–Control Study: More than 40% of individuals with cervical spinal cord injury deal with dysphagia, requiring acute care and inpatient rehabilitation. Researchers show how swallow apnea duration can be used as a predictor of swallowing issues after spinal cord injury.

Postextubation Dysphagia Among Patients With COVID-19: Results of Instrumental Swallow Studies and Clinical Swallow Evaluations: This article highlights the role of the speech-language pathologist (SLP) on the endotracheal tube care team. the authors found that people who had been intubated longer took more time to safely eat by mouth and that individuals had trouble swallowing safely after the tube was removed.

A Clinical Focus on Shared Decision Making in Clinical Practice When Providing Dysarthria and Dysphagia Services to Individuals With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: Shared clinical decision making promotes active involvement from people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and their caregivers. Learn about the benefits of, and barriers to, shared decision making as part of the ALS team.

Poststroke Lingual Function and Swallowing Physiology: People who experience dysphagia after a stroke also have difficulties related to tongue function, but the connection between tongue function and swallowing remains unclear. In this article, researchers investigate the link between tongue endurance and oral impairments in swallow function.

Dysphagia in Infants and Children

Side-Lying Position Is Associated With Improved Swallow Outcomes When Compared to Semi-Upright Position in Infants With Dysphagia: When working with infants with dysphagia, SLPs promote swallow safety by adjusting flow rate and viscosity—or by promoting positional changes. In this study, researchers found that infants fed in a side-lying position had less severe and less frequent aspiration, and future research can better identify infants who can benefit from this feeding position.

Facilitating Pediatric Patients During Videofluoroscopic Swallowing Studies: The videofluoroscopic swallowing study (VFSS) helps SLPs identify dysphagia, but it may be difficult to use in testing infants and children. Learn how to address common barriers to implementing the VFSS in children by implementing deliberate strategies in your practice.

More Swallowing Resources in ASHA Journals

The ASHA Journals publish dozens of articles on dysphagia every year, and you can find exactly what you’re looking for on our topic page or by performing an advanced search. If you’re interested in conducting your own dysphagia research, be sure to read the forum published in AJSLP highlighting ways to foster rigor and transparency in dysphagia research.

In honor of Dysphagia Awareness Month, you can spread the word about the work you and your colleagues do by sharing information from ASHA. By doing so, you may even encourage someone with an untreated swallowing issue to seek help from an ASHA member near them!

We hope that these articles help you continue to provide the best care possible for the millions of Americans with swallowing issues. June is also Aphasia Awareness Month—to learn more about helping people with aphasia communicate, check out our post from earlier this month.