Christine Sapienza, PhD, UF Speech and Language Pathologist and Chair of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders researches speech and voice problems in patients with Parkinson disease and other disorders. A current project is called Expiratory Muscle Strength Training and it was mentioned during the April 16, 2006 Parkinson's special on NBC's Dateline.
Excerpt:
Meanwhile, at the University of Florida, Dr. Christine Sapienza is working on something critical to late-stage P.D. patients who struggle with swallowing.
Dr. Sapienza: One of the things that people are less aware of is that with Parkinson’s Disease the number one cause of their death is not from an inability to walk or an inability to speak, but they die from what’s called aspiration pneumonia.
In the case of a patient with P.D., you can notice the water leaking into the airway, which can cause choking and infection, leading to pneumonia. Dr. Sapienza’s team is testing 48 patients using a device called an expiratory muscle-strength trainer.
So, anybody that had weak respiratory muscles, particularly the muscles that you use for breathing out, would use this device to strengthen them. It’s sort of like a weight machine.
The focus of the Dateline special was Michael J. Fox and Muhammad Ali and their struggle to gain more funding for Parkinson's disease research.
See the article based on the Dateline Parkinson's Disease special . . .
Read more about Dr. Sapienza . . .
Learn more about UF's other movement disorders research . . .
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