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Objectives: Premature infants (born before 37 weeks of gestational age) frequently experience feeding difficulties due to underdeveloped oral motor skills and poor chewing, swallowing, and breathing coordination. In order to improve oral feeding efficiency in these infants, Oral-Motor Stimulation (OMS) has been used in various studies. This systematic review study will aim to assess the effectiveness of OMS for oral feeding in preterm infants., Materials & Methods: The authors will follow the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. They will conduct a search in electronic databases, including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials in The Cochrane Library (CENTRAL), Medline via PubMed, and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) for nursing and related healthcare texts without language restrictions from the first month of 1991 to the fifth month of 2024 to achieve the study objectives. All Randomized Controlled Clinical Trials (RCT) examining the effect of OMS on oral feeding in preterm infants will be included in this study., Results: The primary outcome of this systematic review will be oral feeding, and the secondary outcomes will include duration of hospitalization, weight gain, and feeding efficiency. Two independent reviewers will select and extract data for the study. The Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool (RoB2) will be used to evaluate potential biases in the study. Publication bias will be evaluated using funnel plots, Begg's, and Egger's tests. The degree of heterogeneity among the studies will be assessed using the I2 statistic and the χ2 test. Analyses of subgroups will also be carried out. All meta-analyses will be conducted using Stata V.14., Conclusion: This systematic review protocol for preterm infants will aim to promote evidence-based decision-making and support the development of clinical practice guidelines in preterm feeding., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest., (© 2024 The Authors. Published by Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences.)

Introduction: Problems with the production of sentences with prepositions are one of the most common language problems in people with aphasia (PWA). Structural priming (SP) is one of the theory-based therapeutic approaches to improve these deficits. Although several studies have been conducted on the sentence construction problems of PWA, there is no study on the SP protocol for the production of sentences with Persian prepositions. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of SP in the production of these sentences among Persian-speaking PWA., Methods: This study, with a single-subject ABA design, evaluated the efficacy of SP in the production of trained and untrained sentences containing Persian prepositions in four aphasic individuals with agrammatism and investigated the maintenance effects at 4 weeks post-training., Results: Two subjects (A.G. and M.S.) showed notable changes in the production of trained sentences with Persian prepositions (50% to 91.67% for A.G. and 0% to 66.67% for M.S.). This significant improvement was generalized to sentences with untrained prepositions (50% to 91.67% for A.G. and 0% to 83.33% for M.S.). The treatment effects were also maintained in the 4-week follow-up (d2 = 10.3 for A.G. and d2 = 19.06 for M.S.). However, the other two participants only showed a slight increase in these variables after treatment., Conclusion: The findings of the present study revealed that SP for sentences with prepositions could be useful to varying degrees for Persian-speaking PWA with agrammatism and lead to improved language skills in producing these sentences. Overall, individuals with better language skills and cognitive status in early assessments showed better treatment outcomes than others., (© 2022 S. Karger AG, Basel.)