Office Based Voice Evaluation in Assessing Outcome of Treatment in Laryngeal Disorders

Rapidly evolving global economic status has changed professional behavior. Of late, there is a drastic increase in professional voice users and thereby increase in the patients with voice disorders. Clinically, the changes in the voice can only be perceived but cannot be quantified and documented. It is therefore necessary to have a gadget/tool which is simple and with which we can document and quantify the voice change objectively. This is a prospective case control study with 50 normal control subjects (25 male and 25 female subjects) who had no voice complaints and 50 patients(cases) who presented with complaints of change in voice due to various voice pathologies, the voices were recorded from the control group and also from the cases group both pre and posttreatment and were analyzed. The disease specific frequency in various pathologies of voice pre and post treatment were documented. The degree of change in voice frequency pre and post treatment were compared with each other and with the average frequency obtained from the voices in the control group. Office based acoustic analysis can definitely be used as a simple tool for documenting voice changes on outpatient basis and it provides a dependable documented evidence with which we can even compare the results following treatment.