LSVT LOUD

 LSVT LOUD refers to the Lee Silverman  Voice Treatment. LSVT LOUD is an effective speech treatment for people  with Parkinson's disease (PD) and other neurological conditions. LSVT  LOUD trains people with PD to use their voice at a more normal loudness  level while speaking at home, work, or in the community. Key to the  treatment is helping people "recalibrate" their perceptions so they know  how loud or soft they sound to other people and can feel comfortable  using a stronger voice at a normal loudness level.

PD can often affect communication in 2 ways:

Creating a mismatch between how you think you're talking vs how you actually sound

Difficulty coming up with words you want to say

LSVT LOUD directly addresses these symptoms for proven communication improvements.

LSVT LOUD is an intensive, one-on-one treatment delivered over one month’s time:

• One-hour sessions
• Four sessions per week
• Four weeks in a row
• Daily homework and carryover exercises

The exercises address the ability to physically get loud and to retrain the patient to use a loud voice in a healthy manner with long-term carry  over.

LSVT LOUD improves:

Vocal Loudness - LOUD treatment helps you to speak with a voice and volume that's easy for others to hear and understand.

Communication - Improved speech intelligibility from calibrated vocal loudness results in fewer communicative breakdowns.

Self  Esteem - Being able to be understood easily increases confidence in  social situations and feeling included in conversations.

 Patients will perform a series of sustained "AH" sounds at various  pitches as well as a series of functional phrases. The functional  phrases will be selected by the patient based on phrases that they say  on a daily basis and are meaningful to them. These phrases will be  targeted to generalize the practiced loudness to everyday speech. Other  hierarchical verbal expression tasks are completed to practice using the  LOUD voice in different settings. These tasks start at the word level  and advance to the conversation level by the end of the program.