Selçuk Engin Burak, Erbay Lale Gönenir, Özcan Özlem Özel, Kartalci Şükrü, Batcioğlu Kadir
Department of Family Medicine, Inonu University Medical Faculty, Malatya, Turkey.
Department of Psychiatry, Inonu University Medical Faculty, Malatya, Turkey.
Ther Clin Risk Manag. 2015 May 14;11:793-8. doi: 10.2147/TCRM.S83129. eCollection 2015.
Stuttering is defined as a disruption in the rhythm of speech and language articulation, where the subject knows what he/she wants to say, but is unable to utter the intended word or phrase fluently. The effect of sex on development and chronicity of stuttering is well known; it is more common and chronic in males. We aimed to investigate the relationship between developmental stuttering and serum testosterone levels in this study.
In this study, we evaluated a total of 50 children (7-12 years of age); eight (16%) were female and 42 (84%) were male. Twenty-five children who stutter and 25 typically fluent peers with the same demographic properties (ages between 7 years and 12 years) were included in this study. The testosterone levels of the two groups were determined in terms of nanogram per milliliter (ng/mL) by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The difference between the means of the two groups was analyzed.
The medians of the testosterone levels of the stutterer and control groups were determined as 20 ng/mL (range =12-184 ng/mL) and 5 ng/mL (range =2-30 ng/mL), respectively. Testosterone levels of the stutterer group were significantly higher than in the control group (P=0.001). Besides, there was a significant correlation between the severity of the stuttering and testosterone levels in the stutterer group (P=0.0001).
The findings of this study show that testosterone may have an effect on the severity of developmental stuttering and on the clinical differences between sexes. However, further investigations are needed to show that testosterone may play a role in the etiology of developmental stuttering.
口吃被定义为言语和语言发音节奏的中断，即个体知道自己想说什么，但无法流畅地说出想要表达的单词或短语。性别对口吃的发展和慢性病程的影响是众所周知的；口吃在男性中更为常见且病程更长。在本研究中，我们旨在调查发育性口吃与血清睾酮水平之间的关系。
在本研究中，我们共评估了50名儿童（7至12岁）；其中8名（16%）为女性，42名（84%）为男性。本研究纳入了25名口吃儿童和25名具有相同人口统计学特征（年龄在7岁至12岁之间）的正常流利儿童。通过酶联免疫吸附测定法以纳克每毫升（ng/mL）为单位测定两组儿童的睾酮水平。分析两组均值之间的差异。
口吃组和对照组的睾酮水平中位数分别确定为20 ng/mL（范围 = 12 - 184 ng/mL）和5 ng/mL（范围 = 2 - 30 ng/mL）。口吃组的睾酮水平显著高于对照组（P = 0.001）。此外，口吃组中口吃严重程度与睾酮水平之间存在显著相关性（P = 0.0001）。
本研究结果表明，睾酮可能对发育性口吃的严重程度以及性别之间的临床差异有影响。然而，需要进一步的研究来证明睾酮可能在发育性口吃的病因学中起作用。
