Use of a bite block for treatment of lingual dystonia

By L. Karcher and K. Forrest

An 82-year-old man with lingual dystonia that interfered with his speech and eating was seen for evaluation. Although he was relatively intelligible, the subject’s speech was slow and unnatural. A bite-block was constructed and inserted between the upper and lower cuspids resulting in immediate improvements in intelligibility, rate and naturalness. Follow-up evaluation of the subject at four-month intervals indicated that these improvements were maintained when the bite-block was used; speech intelligibility without the bite-block continued to decline over this period.