Saturday, September 03, 2005

Lidcombe randomized trial

I have decided to become a bit more of a scientist again, which means that I will pick out a few interesting articles and comment on them.

I am currently reading a therapy outcome study on the Lidcombe treatment for children. The article by Jones, Onslow, Packmann et al. is published in the British Medical Journal under the title "Randomised controlled trial of the Lidcombe programme of early stuttering intervention". Look at the abstract. You can also download the pdf file.

As I said many times before, outcome studies are very tricky to do, and on treating children is even more tricky due to the natural recovery rate. Thus, if a child becomes fluent after treatment, was it a natural recovery or the result of the treatment? The only way to do this is to look at a larger sample of children. I will talk about it more in my next post.

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