Article Text
Abstract
Background Dysphagia is a common complication after stroke. Water swallowing test (WST) is a recognised but limited tool in providing details about dysphagia, including severity and how to adjust the diet based on the test results.
Methods We performed a prospective observational study of comparing WST and volume–viscosity swallow test (V-VST) in patients with acute stroke within 14 days. All patients had WST and if failed would have a V-VST. The primary outcome was to compare the dysphagia levels assessed by these two test tools. The secondary outcome was to explore the predictive capability in patients who were at high risk of pneumonia by these two swallowing tests.
Results Consecutively 276 patients with stroke were enrolled in our study, and 197 had normal WST. Among 79 patients who had both WST and V-VST, 20 showed swallowing safety and effectiveness by V-VST. The chance of being on tube feeding was strongly related to the positive results of failed WST (p<0.001). Both tests showed good predictive ability in patients with stroke for pneumonia even some of them were placed on tube feeding (p=0.001 in WST and p<0.001 in V-VST).
Conclusions V-VST performed better as a clinical screening test for dysphagia in patients with acute stroke at the bedside.
Trial registration number ChiCTR1800016442.
- stroke
- dysphagia
- water swallowing test
- volume-viscosity swallow test
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Footnotes
Patient consent for publication Obtained.
TY and SH contributed equally.
Contributors QD designed and draft the protocol. TY and SH performed the study, collected and analysis the data and draft the manuscript. YD designed study and revised the manuscript. They have participated and approved the protocol after revision.
Funding This work was supported in part by the foundations from Fudan University (FNF201726).
Competing interests All interventions were sponsored by Nestle Health Science. Otherwise, the sponsor does not play a role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation or data reporting. There is no other conflict of interest.
Ethics approval The Ethics Committee of Huashan Hospital, Fudan University.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement Data are available by contacting the corresponding author.
Correction notice This article has been corrected since it was published Online First. The affiliations were numbered incorrectly.