White Paper by the European Society for Swallowing Disorders: Screening and Non-instrumental Assessment for Dysphagia in Adults.
Renée Speyer, Reinie Cordier, Daniele Farneti and 5 others
PMID 33787994WHAT IT FOUND
Many commonly used dysphagia screening tools and patient questionnaires have poor or unproven accuracy.
The paper recommends stopping use of unvalidated measures and relying only on tools with strong evidence for the specific patient population being assessed.
Key findings
01Most existing patient self-report measures for dysphagia have poor psychometric properties or lack comprehensive evaluation.
02The Eating Assessment Tool (EAT-10) is not supported for use in research or clinical practice due to contemporary item response theory analyses.
03Screening tools should be discontinued if they are not validated, and clinicians should use only tools with good diagnostic performance and reliability.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTsWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
This is a consensus statement and narrative review, not a primary research study with new patient data. The paper notes that many existing measures have missing or indeterminate evidence, so conclusions on their robustness are preliminary. There is no international consensus on the optimal cut-off scores for diagnostic performance of screening tools.
Declared interests
The paper is a white paper by the European Society for Swallowing Disorders (ESSD). The provided text does not list specific funding sources or individual author conflicts of interest, but it is a society-endorsed document.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret this paper as providing a single 'best' screening tool for all patients. It emphasizes that validity is population-specific, so a tool validated for stroke patients may not be appropriate for patients with dementia or head and neck cancer without further testing.