Teresa Drulia
Texas Christian University, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Muscle tension dysphonia (MTD) is a voice disorder in which overly tight muscles around the voice box strain the voice. It is the most common voice disorder among people who seek treatment.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
- Topics
muscle tension dysphonia
voice disorders
voice therapy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test whether local translaryngeal vibration (LTLV), a gentle vibration applied over the voice box, improves outcomes when combined with flow phonation therapy in patients with muscle tension dysphonia (MTD).
- Compare voice outcomes of flow phonation with and without vibration in a blinded, randomized controlled trial of treatment-seeking patients with MTD.
- Determine the dose-response relationship for LTLV, including which vibration frequency produces the strongest clinical response, to guide its use in voice therapy.
More about the research
Behavioral voice therapy helps, and flow phonation (also called stretch-and-flow therapy) is among the most effective evidence-based approaches. Yet after therapy, patients' voice measures often remain well outside the normal range. That gap carries costs and lowers quality of life, which motivates better treatments.
Why it matters
People with muscle tension dysphonia often finish voice therapy with voice function and voice handicap still outside normal levels. If adding laryngeal vibration to flow phonation therapy proves effective, and an effective dose is identified, speech-language pathologists could gain a practical tool to achieve better outcomes for their patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Amanda Gillespie
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Compare patient outcomes, including long-term outcomes, between Conversation Training Therapy (CTT) delivered non-hierarchically within conversation from the start and a reproducible hierarchical version with the same components.
Rosemary Lester-Smith
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine whether simultaneous neck-skin vibration sensor and head-mounted microphone recordings can tell apart breathing, voice box and vocal tract contributions to vibrato, a voice-modulating technique, in trained singers.
Laura Toles
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Identify personality traits and daily voice behaviors that come before phonotrauma, by following vocally healthy college freshman singers for three years with personality inventories, ambulatory voice monitoring and high-speed videoendoscopy.
The school
Texas Christian University: 2 labs on PI Pages, $28M a year on research, 41 research doctorates a year.
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