A Clinical Study on Unilateral Vocal Fold Paralysis and its Management at Tertiary Care Hospital

Introduction:Voice is an essential part of human life.It is an indispensable part of effective communication and conveys a person's mood and feelings.Laryngeal dysfunction produces symptoms which can vary from hoarseness of voice to life threatening stridor.This study was conducted to evaluate a comparative outcome between speech therapy and vocal fold medialisation techniques.Objective: To study the outcome following speech therapy and medialisation thyroplasty in patients with unilateral vocal cord paralysis. Materials and methods:This is a prospective longitudinal study of 30 patients diagnosed with unilateral vocal fold paralysis at Civil Hospital, Ahmedabad and underwent treatment for the same between a period of June, 2019 to December, 2021.Result: Left vocal cord palsy was more common as compared to right, left recurrent laryngeal nerve is more frequently involved because of longer course.All patients had primary complaint of hoarseness of voice, breathiness was the next common presenting complaint, followed by vocal fatigue.An improvement in both subjective parameters was seen post treatment. Conclusion:Conservative treatment in form of speech therapy was given to the patients (43%) which helped in improvement of voice quality but not glottic insufficiency.Improvement was seen mainly due to compensatory mechanism.Adequate glottic closure was achieved by both surgical methods that we used.The quality of voice of patients improved significantly.