Abstract
Drooling is a distressing condition, which is often caused by reduced oral motor control associated with a neurological disorder. It has significant medical, practical and psychosocial impact on children or youth and their families. Therefore, treatment is necessary. Although behavioural therapy for drooling shows promising results, it is generally time- and cost-intensive. For this reason, alternative ways to provide behavioural treatment for chronic drooling need to be explored. In a pair of case studies, the feasibility and potential of an outpatient variant of a behavioural treatment programme for drooling based on self-management strategies was researched with two children with oral motor difficulties. In a three week programme, these children were taught to perform a self-management routine in order to achieve saliva control during regular visits to the child rehabilitation centre. In addition, their parents and teachers were taught to prompt the self-management routine and instructed to provide additional practice at home and at school. In doing so, they were offered support by means of telehealth and personal contact. At the end of the treatment programme, both children showed a significant decrease in drooling severity. Their parents and teachers were satisfied with the treatment effect. Although the present treatment programme showed promising results, further adaptions are necessary to make the treatment programme more widely accessible.
Highlights
Drooling is a distressing condition, which is often caused by reduced oral motor control associated with a neurological disorder
Van der Burg et al (2009) developed a centre-based treatment programme for chronic drooling based on self-management techniques
In a pair of case studies, the outpatient variant of a self-management programme was provided to two children suffering from chronic drooling
Summary
Drooling is a distressing condition, which is often caused by reduced oral motor control associated with a neurological disorder. In a three week inpatient intervention period at a child rehabilitation centre, participants were taught to perform self-management skills for saliva control and learned to remain dry for increasing time intervals This programme was evaluated in a case series with 10 children (aged between 7;0 and 19;9 years) with neurodevelopmental disabilities. Maintenance of the positive treatment effect 6 weeks after treatment was demonstrated by 6 participants and four of them maintained the treatment effect until 24 weeks follow-up This self-management programme for chronic drooling yielded promising results, these kind of inpatient interventions are generally time- and cost-intensive and might not be cost-effective. As training takes place in a variety of settings, including the child’s natural environment, problems in generalisation and maintenance may be circumvented (Stokes and Osnes 1989)
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