Original ArticlesPresenting Signs and Symptoms do not Predict Aspiration Risk in Children
Section snippets
Methods
We retrospectively reviewed the records of all children under 2 years of age who had both a CFE and VFSS for the evaluation of oropharyngeal dysphagia at Boston Children's Hospital in 2015. Records were reviewed for patient characteristics, comorbidities, and swallow study characteristics including radiation dose. VFSS results were considered abnormal if there was evidence of aspiration or laryngeal penetration seen for any texture. Laryngeal penetration was considered abnormal based on our
Results
We evaluated 412 total subjects with a mean age of 8.9 ± 6.9 months, all of whom had VFSS performed; 160 of these had both CFE and VFSS performed. Within the entire cohort, 38% (n = 156) of the VFSS showed aspiration, 33% (n = 137) showed penetration alone, and 27% (n = 107) did not show evidence of aspiration or penetration; 3% (n = 12) of subjects were unable to complete their VFSS. Subject characteristics, symptoms present at the time of referral, and subject comorbidities are shown in
Discussion
In the present study, we evaluated presenting symptoms for children under 2 years of age who had their first CFE and VFSS, and compared the agreement between these 2 modes of swallow evaluation, and determined the ability of each presenting symptom to predict VFSS and CFE results. We found that there was no single symptom that could reliably predict which patients would have evidence of aspiration on VFSS, and this translates to decreased sensitivity of the CFE compared with the VFSS.
Relatively
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Cited by (0)
Supported by the Boston Children's Hospital Translational Research Program Senior Investigator Award (RR), NIH R01 DK097112 (RR) and NIH T32 DK007477 (DD). The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
Portions of this study were presented at Digestive Disease Week, May 6-9, 2017, Chicago, Illinois and the NASPGHAN Annual Meeting, November 1-4, 2017, Las Vegas, Nevada.