Therapeutic strategies for tongue musculature: a systematic literature review.

The review only describes what exercises were prescribed. It did not test whether any of them changed anything for a patient, and it says so explicitly. The studies were too different from one another to combine, so there is no pooled estimate of anything. Only clinical trials were included, so useful studies using other designs may have been missed, and no hand search was done outside the database search. Some studies use descriptors that are not MeSH terms, which may have kept them out of database searches built from MeSH terms. The participants ranged from four-year-old children to 95-year-old adults with very different conditions, so a prescription reported in one group may have nothing to do with the group you treat. Most individual studies were small, with the largest analysing 148 people and many well under 50, and blinding was essentially absent: one study blinded participants and two blinded therapists. The report is inconsistent about how many studies described their parameters too poorly to replicate, giving both eight and ten. Two of the 18 included papers were protocol registrations with no results.

The text supplied contains no funding statement and no declaration of competing interests, so it is not possible to say who paid for this work or what the authors declared.

Do not read the quality scores as evidence that tongue exercises work. The PEDro ratings describe how well the trials were designed and reported, and the review itself did not measure whether any exercise helped any patient. The scale's own documentation, quoted in the paper, warns that a high score is not evidence of clinical usefulness.