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Conclusions: The present results indicate that the diagnosis of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is an independent etiological factor predicting retardation of the resolution of laryngeal granuloma. Objectives: To assess the effects of combined usage of an inhaled corticosteroid plus tranilast and/or a proton pump inhibitor on the size of granulomatous lesions, and to reveal etiological factors related to the outcome using the Kaplan-Meier method and a subsequent multivariate analysis. Methods: Sixty-two patients with laryngeal granuloma were enrolled. An inhaled corticosteroid plus tranilast (300mg/day) and rabeprazole (20mg/day) were administered to all of the patients, and only to those diagnosed to have GERD, respectively. The size of granulomatous lesion was measured for each patient at the initial visit and every 4 weeks. At 48 weeks, the Kaplan-Meier plots for lesion disappearance rate were compared between groups with and without each of the etiological factors, followed by Cox proportional-hazards regression. Results: The 48-week lesion disappearance rates for the whole population were 82.3%. Although the Kaplan-Meier analysis exhibited significant differences between patients separated by GERD diagnosis, phonotrauma, and habitual smoking, only GERD were identified as a real independent etiological factor affecting the resolution of the lesion by a multivariate analysis using Cox's proportional-hazards regression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The purposes of this study were to validate the Acoustic Breathiness Index (ABI) for the Japanese-speaking population and to determine whether it is independent of factors such as sex, age, and perceptual ratings of roughness. Method: First, the concurrent validity of the ABI for perceptual breathiness was evaluated on the concatenations of continuous speech and sustained vowels from 288 patients with varying degrees of dysphonia. The diagnostic accuracy was examined on 343 samples with 55 additional normophonic speakers. Second, the validity related to responsiveness-tochange was estimated on 222 samples obtained before and after interventions for 111 voice-disordered patients. Third, the relationships between the ABI and other variables (i.e., perceptual hoarseness/breathiness/roughness, sex, and age) were explored using bivariate and multivariate analyses for the 288 patients. Results: First, the concurrent validity and the responsivenessto-change validity were confirmed by strong correlation coefficients of .890 and .878, respectively. Second, the receiver operating characteristic analysis showed the area under the curve to be 0.939, indicating excellent accuracy. The ABI of 3.44 exhibited a sensitivity of 76.3% and a specificity of 94.1%. Third, although bivariate analyses revealed a weak relationship between ABI and roughness and an ABI difference by age, multiple regression analyses showed a strong relation between only ABI and breathiness, without a meaningful contribution from roughness, sex, and age factors. Conclusion: The study confirmed that the ABI is an accurate and specific tool to estimate breathiness levels in the Japanese-speaking population and neither roughness, sex, nor age significantly affects the ABI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]