Interoception, Voice Symptom Reporting, and Voice Disorders.
Julianna Comstock Smeltzer, Sy Han Chiou, Adrianna C Shembel
PMID 37012093WHAT IT FOUND
Patients with functional voice disorders who report worse voice symptoms also struggle to attend to body sensations.
They do not differ from healthy people in overall interoceptive awareness, but those with muscle tension dysphonia show lower emotional awareness of bodily cues.
Key findings
01Patients with functional voice and upper airway disorders who scored higher on voice handicap and vocal fatigue measures had significantly lower attention regulation scores on the MAIA-2.
02There were no significant differences in overall self-reported interoceptive awareness between patients with functional voice disorders and typical voice users.
03Patients with primary muscle tension dysphonia scored significantly lower on the Emotional Awareness subscale compared to typical voice users.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study is cross-sectional, so it cannot determine whether low interoceptive awareness causes higher symptom reporting or vice versa. The MAIA-2 is a self-report measure, subject to response bias and individual interpretation. The sample size was insufficient to achieve adequate statistical power for the primary comparison of MAIA-2 scores across voice disorder classes, leading to non-significant trends. The MAIA-2 was normed on healthy populations, so lower scores in patients do not necessarily indicate pathology. Singing experience was poorly controlled, with only binary self-report data available for patients.
Declared interests
The authors declared no competing interests. No specific funding source is mentioned in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that mindfulness or interoceptive training treats voice disorders. This study shows an association between self-reported symptom severity and interoceptive awareness scores, but it did not test any intervention.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →