Invited Lecture: Predicting Recovery and Persistency in Stuttering

This talk will explore the relationships among epidemiological and clinical risk factors of stuttering persistency to determine whether combinations of factors confer a higher risk of stuttering persistence in preschoolers who stutter. We collected epidemiological and clinical measures from 52 4- and 5-year-old preschoolers (38 boys and 14 girls) diagnosed as stuttering then followed these children longitudinally to document whether they eventually recovered or persisted. We used children’s data to build multiple variable predictive models of stuttering persistency and found that the full model incorporating multiple risk factors yielded more accurate predictions of stuttering persistency compared to sparser models with fewer risk factors. I will discuss the clinical implications of this research, specifically how clinicians can use our findings to evaluate a child’s risk for stuttering persistency.