Speech therapy for children with early acquired dysarthria

Dysarthria is a disorder which reduces the control of movements for speech. Children with dysarthria often have shallow, irregular breathing and speak on small, residual pockets of air. They have low pitched, harsh voices, nasalised speech and very poor articulation. Together, these difficulties make the children's speech difficult to understand. Dysarthria is caused by neurological impairment and can arise early in children's lives, from neurological damage sustained before, during or after birth, such as in cerebral palsy, or in early childhood through traumatic brain injury or neurological disease. Communication difficulties have a profound impact on children’s development. They reduce the quality of life of children with cerebral palsy and place children at risk of social exclusion, educational failure and later unemployment. Speech and language therapy aims to help children to control the movements for breathing and speech and so become more intelligible. Small, observational studies have suggested that for some children therapy might have been associated with positive changes in intelligibility and clarity of children's voices. This review aimed to investigate if therapy is generally effective for children with dysarthria acquired early in life, and if certain types of therapy may be better than others. We found no randomised controlled trials or controlled group studies which investigate the effects of speech and language therapy to improve the speech of children with dysarthria acquired below three years of age. Rigorous research, using randomised controlled trials, is needed to evaluate if therapy can help children to increase the intelligibility of their speech and if enhanced intelligibility increases children's participation in social and educational activities and their quality of life.