IOPI Medical Q2 Newsletter - Tell Us Your IOPI Story!

From the entire IOPI Medical family, we wish you a happy spring. This quarter we have information on June’s ASHA Online Conference: Empowered SLPs in Healthcare, helpful resources and articles, as well as tongue specific research. We’d also like your help with making us the best we can possibly be for our customers.

Don’t forget to visit our always evolving website. We are continuing to make improvements, giving you the opportunity to interact with our IOPI staff, Patient Advocacy tools, and Covid-19 resources. You can visit our homepage by clicking the button below.

You can also follow us on Twitter (@iopimedical) & Facebook (IOPI Medical LLC) for the latest news and information.

Over the years we have attended several conferences and meetings where we often hear story after story of just how much the IOPI affects people’s lives. Quite honestly, these stories remind us why we do what we do. Of course, in the time of COVID, we are no longer attending in-person events and are sorely lacking in our feel-good stories. We were hoping that you might be able to help.

If you have patient stories that you wouldn’t mind sharing, we would really appreciate it. You can share as little or as much information as you and your patient are comfortable with. Please send us an email at info@iopimedical.com (you can click the button below), or even better, give us a call at 425-549-0139!

Not only will these stories be wonderful to share in future newsletters and social media, but they would also be a great morale boost for our team.

To help you achieve the greatest level of success for your patients, we continue to provide you with the necessary Purchasing Advocacy tools, as well as clinical support.

Our Purchasing Advocacy tools can be found on our Medical Professionals page. Here, you will find our IOPI Dysphagia Cost Tool as well as a ready to use Benefits of IOPI for Dysphagia PowerPoint. Just populate it with information specific to your patient’s needs.

You also have clinical support at your fingertips. Our clinical consultant, Ed M. Bice, M.Ed., CCC-SLP is available to mentor through the advocacy process to assess and report the estimated cost of dysphagia to your facility. You can reach Ed for a patient consultation or clinical question by calling (844)-844-IOPI or emailing ed@iopimedical.com.

As many of you have already experienced, another fantastic resource are our webinars. We currently have dates through the end of April for our webinar program, which includes an IOPI Advocacy webinar, as well as IOPI 101: Introduction to the IOPI System, a 1-hour webinar that introduces you to the IOPI Pro and IOPI Trainer, demonstrates the standard methods for measuring tongue and lip strength and endurance, and explains how to use this system for biofeedback during exercise.

We will also add dates covering May & June. Schedules for our webinars will be updated on our website as soon as the information is available. If you are interested in registering for a webinar or checking our schedule, please click the button below.

IOPI Medical will be participating in ASHA’s online conference, taking place June 2-14.

In this online conference, hear from experts and discuss with your peers the service delivery challenges you are facing right now.

"The conference will help you redefine what success as a health care SLP looks like and realign your goals with the complex realities of today's health care system. Walk away with feasible solutions and the confidence, strategies, and tools to advocate for your patients, yourself, and your fellow service providers—and be a leader for positive change in your workplace."

If you would like to learn, connect, or just say hello, please click the button below to register!

The Influence of Age, Eating a Meal, and Systematic Fatigue on Swallowing and Mealtime Parameters - D. Brates and S. Molfenter

Thirty healthy females, (15 “young” and 15 “old”) were seen two sessions one week apart. In both sessions the participants consumed half a bagel with peanut butter and carrot sticks. On one of the two days a pre-meal fatigue task was included. The task involved maximal tongue presses until participants could not achieve 40% of baseline maximum pressure. Pre and post-meal measures were collected (anterior and posterior maximum tongue pressures, saliva swallow pressure, tongue endurance, surface electromyography traces of the submental region, the modified Borg scale, and the Test of Mastication and Swallowing of Solids) with both conditions. The fatigue task caused significant reductions in maximum anterior and posterior tongue pressure. After consuming the items without the fatigue task decreased anterior pressures occurred in the older group only. Older participants experienced decreased saliva swallow pressures, while saliva swallow pressures increased post-mean in the young participants. Eating after tongue fatigue resulted in significantly lower posterior tongue pressures in both. The findings demonstrate that a tongue fatigue task induced measurable changes in maximum tongue pressure. It appears that older adults may be more vulnerable to fatigue-induced changes in tongue strength, though the relationship between these measures and changes to functional swallowing remains unknown.

With 18 years of research using the IOPI, it can be difficult to choose only a few articles to share with you. To narrow the field a bit, we choose a specific topic to focus on in each newsletter. For this quarter, we have chosen articles related specifically to the tongue and have provided you with three relevant pieces.

This is only a small fraction of the number of IOPI-related studies in general. You can find many more, covering a variety of topics, by visiting: https://iopimedical.com/studies/ or clicking the button below.

Biomechanical Biomarkers of Tongue Impairment During Swallowing in Persons Diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32347416/

Twelve participants diagnosed with ALS underwent electromagnetic articulography to derive biomechanical measures of the tongue and a videofluoroscopic evaluation to measure swallow physiology, safety, efficiency, and maximal tongue strength testing using the IOPI. Participants also completed self-reported functional assessments. Findings demonstrated associations between tongue biomechanics and swallowing physiology, swallow safety, and self-reported measures. Swallowing safety during thin liquid intake was associated with tongue speed and range of motion, and swallowing safety with pureed textures was associated with tongue strength measurements.

Effects of Effortful Swallowing Exercise with Progressive Anterior Tongue Press Using Iowa Oral Performance Instrument (IOPI) on the Strength of Swallowing-Related Muscles in the Elderly: A Preliminary Study:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33566219/

The purpose of this study was to confirm the effect of effortful swallowing (ES) exercise programs applied to increase the swallowing-related muscle strength in the elderly. In this study, 20 healthy elderly people exercised for 7 weeks. One group performed effortful swallows using the IOPI for biofeedback. The other group performed effortful swallows without feedback. In both groups, the exercises were performed for 20 min a day, 2 days a week for 7. At week 8, the anterior and swallowing tongue pressures and anterior tongue endurance were significantly higher in the feedback group.

Tongue-Strengthening Exercises in Healthy Older Adults: Effect of Exercise Frequency – A Randomized Trial:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32023617/

Twenty healthy adults were randomly assigned to two exercise frequency groups. One group trained 3 time per week and the other group trained 5 times per week using the IOPI. Data collection included maximum anterior and posterior tongue pressure, and anterior and posterior pressures during saliva swallows. Pressures were measured at baseline and after four and eight weeks of training. Measurements were also collected four and eight weeks after training ceased. Significant increases in all measurements for both training groups were found. No significant differences on any parameter were found between three times per week and five times per week groups. No significant detraining effects were found after four or eight weeks in either group.