Marion Bortoluzzi

Speech and language therapy for a child with severe burns Marion Bortoluzzi

33% of the total number of burn victims in France are children under the age of five. The improvement of care has led to an increase in their life expectancy but is accompanied by an increase in sequelae. Multidisciplinary teams have evolved and the speech therapist is now an integral part of them. We wondered about our field of action with these children traumatized at the level of the oral sphere and thought that a specific speech therapy on certain muscle groups could reduce the functional deficits and the rigidity of the facial mimicry. We conducted a single case study of a 5-year-old child with craniocervical-facial burns before the age of 2 years, who was followed up with speech therapy almost daily. We used two objective tools to collect monthly measurements: the surface electromyogram (or neuro-biofeedback) to measure the electrical activity of different muscle groups, and the caliper graduated in millimeters to measure the smile amplitude.