Pharyngeal Residues Scoring through the Yale Pharyngeal Residue Severity Rating Scale (YPRSRS): Efficacy of Training.

Only 25 clinicians completed both assessments; 4 dropped out, and the authors say the study may have been too small to detect a difference. All the students got the training, so there was no untrained student group and their improvement could reflect practice with the same clips rather than the course. The groups were not identical at the start: more of the control group had taken part in or performed over 100 FEES examinations, a difference the authors report as significant. The clips and frames came from routine clinical work at one university hospital rather than selected best examples, which the authors say may have made the task harder. The paper does not say whether raters knew which group they were in.

The only funder named is the University of Milan, which is the authors' own institution. No commercial sponsor or competing interest is named in the text provided.

Do not read this as proof that the training sharpens residue scoring. Trained clinicians did not score closer to the experts than untrained ones, agreement between raters did not change in any group, and still-frame scoring did not change at all. The one improvement that did reach significance within the trained group was for pyriform sinus videos and was a single comparison at p = 0.049, while the valleculae video scores in the same group did not reach significance.