Outpatient Treatment Based on Self-Management Strategies for Chronic Drooling in Two Children.
Weekly telehealth check-ins plus parent coaching can halve drooling in three weeks.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Two children with oral motor delays visited a hospital clinic once a week for three weeks.
Parents learned to coach a simple mouth-wipe routine at home while a BCBA watched on video.
The team counted how often each child’s chin stayed dry during meals and play.
What they found
Both kids cut drooling by more than half after the third visit.
Parents kept the routine going alone and dryness held up for the next month.
How this fits with other research
Lancioni et al. (2009) first showed that a microswitch buzzer could teach the same wipe response without adult help.
TWCosta et al. (2017) keeps the self-management idea but swaps the buzzer for parent cues plus Zoom coaching.
García-Villamisar et al. (2017) also used short outpatient visits, proving the model works for parent training too, not just drooling.
Why it matters
You can run a drooling program without daily clinic trips. Give families a wipe card, a tally sheet, and a 15-minute Zoom slot. Expect big drops in wet shirts and fewer skin infections.
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02At a glance
03Original 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.
, 2017 · doi:10.1007/s10882-017-9553-1