Jan 31
What are the long term effects of alcoholism in concern to speech patterns?
ALCOHOLISM ADDICTION Add comments
This question has to deal with long term alcohol abuse, not alcohol intoxication.
Tags: alcoholism, concern, Effects, long, patterns, speech, Term
well if it’s determined that a person has throat cancer from drinking too much alcohol then the long term effects will effect their speech pattern.
Most cases alcohol damages the liver.
Slurred speech usually occurs when a person is drunk and wears off when the alcohol disspates from the system.
Alcohol dehydrates you, including your vocal cords. When you speak when your vocal cords are dry they bang together and get damaged. Sometimes you can notice this after a night of drinking. Long term abuse creates more permanent damage to the folds, which may remain after quitting drinking, but can be helped by speech therapy. Vocal fold trauma presents as a change in the quality of the voice -huskiness, hoarseness, and sometimes pain with talking.
Long term alchohol abuse can also increase your chance of oral or laryngeal(voice box) cancer by 100 (3 drinks a day) to 500% (10 drinks a day). Obviously surgery to remove these affects speech alot; if the whole larynx needs to be remove patients must breathe through a hole in their neck and normal speech cannot occur (though there are some good forms of alternate speech).
Other effects of alcohol (eg liver)can cause the body to be weakened or dehydrated and contribute to vocal hoarseness. Any brain damage sustained from heavy, long term drinking rarely affect the movement of the muscles that enable speech sounds.
While it’s true that throat and laryngeal cancer can happen, there’s more to add.
Long-term alcoholism can result in Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome (encephalopathy; NOT Wernicke’s aphasia– that’s an entirely different disorder), which is characterized by disordered eye movements (particularly upward gaze), psychosis associated with dementia, pupillary alterations, nystagmus, and ataxia with tremors. The syndrome causes irreversible brain damage.
The tremors can affect the voice, and the ataxia can cause a type of dysarthria (weakness, slowness, or incoordination of speech). Also seen are severe short-term memory deficits.
Remember that speech, cognitive, language, voice, swallowing, and fluency deficits are treated by speech pathologists, so your question about “speech disorders” can encompass a broadly-interpreted area. I included all the symptomsof W-K, including speech, because most affect communication.
Speech and cognition can be impaired by acute liver failure (hepatic encephalopathy), as well.