My Father has MSA. He is having significant difficulties with his speech and his breathing. His diaphragm appears to be spasm and he finds it difficult to breath. We have not had any advice from physio or SLT re. how to help with these problems. He is deteriorating very quickly and nobody local seems to know anything about how to treat this disorder, although his neurologist is very helpful. Can anyone share any experiences of this rare disease and any breathing speech exercises which might assist him? We are desperate! Many thanks for any help/advice


Nicola

Hi Nicola,

I am sorry to hear about your father and this particularly unpleasant disease. If breathing and speech are difficult I am not sure how beneficial breathing exerxises would be. Generally for dysarthria we look at breathing from the diaghpragm, and using a few words on each breath - but this may not help your father right now. I would also strongly recommend you look at alternative forms of communication.
Alphabet charts - spelling out words, or even pointng to the first letter of each word as you say them can help with intelligibility. There are also a number of communication devices that have speech output and can be accessed in anumber of ways. Some of these devices also allows for environmental control (switching on lights etc), internet access, emailing, music etc.

We have a few downloads on the icommunicate website in the Downloads section (check out Dysarthria and Dysphonia in the Adult Speech Difficulties Download section and Total Communication in the Assistive Communication Download Sections.

If you are looking for communication devices, the Dynavox and the Prentke Romich websites would be good places to start.

I realise this must be a very distressing time for you, and your father will probably be experiencing a number of difficulties, but there are many things that you can do to help communication.

I hope this has been helpful. Please let me know if you need more information, or would like to chat online and get some more information.

Johan - icommunicate therapy