Appendix I
Appendix I: Recent Medical Studies Regarding Stuttering
The following is an excerpt from a segment the National Public Radio ran on drug studies related to stuttering:
JOHN YDSTIE, host:
Gerald Maguire, Ph.D. used to avoid the telephone and struggled with pronouncing his own name. He stuttered, and even ordering a fast-food meal was difficult.
He stutters less today, largely because of olanzapine, a medication that shows promise as a treatment for the disorder. Gerald Maguire, who is an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California-Irvine, joins us now. Thanks for being with us, Dr. Maguire.
Dr. GERALD MAGUIRE (University of California-Irvine): And thank you, John.
YDSTIE: Tell us about this medication olanzapine.
Dr. MAGUIRE: This is a medication that's actually utilized in the United States and around the world for the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. It lowers the brain chemical dopamine, and we believe that dopamine may be abnormally elevated in the brain's of individuals who stutter. But we're not to say that stuttering is like schizophrenia or manic depressive illness. Those disorders likely have that brain chemical elevated in different parts of the brain.
YDSTIE: And you're doing a study on this now, or you just completed a study on this now, right?
Dr. MAGUIRE: Correct. Half the patients in the study were taking a fake pill and the other half were taking the real medication, and neither the patients nor I knew what they were on at the time. And we followed adults who stutter for a period of three months and measured them on, say, the frequency of their stuttering and the duration of their stuttering blocks.
YDSTIE: What were the results of this study? And how much...
Dr. MAGUIRE: Yeah.
YDSTIE: ...was stuttering reduced among people who took olanzapine?
Dr. MAGUIRE: Those individuals who took the olanzapine compared to those who took the fake pill, the average reduction in symptoms was about 40 percent. On the fake pill, the reduction in symptoms was about 15 percent.
YDSTIE: And you've been a guinea pig in your own experiment, I understand.
Dr. MAGUIRE: I wasn't part of the formal trial itself. But one nice thing about having a disorder is you can empathize with your patients with it, and you can try out the different treatments beforehand. And I actually started taking olanzapine over four years ago.
YDSTIE: And what has it done for you?
Dr. MAGUIRE: Well, I remember as a child that every New Year's, I would make a resolution when that ball would drop that, "Next year, I'm not going to stutter anymore." And that would last till around 12:02 AM, at the very most, I think it was, until I started to talk again. I said, "Well, I gotta wait till next year."
YDSTIE: Right.
Dr. MAGUIRE: It's changed me in that as a person who stutters, we oft may live in a shell, so to speak. And even though I was always an outgoing person, deep down I tend to avoid certain situations in my life from a social standpoint, dating and so forth, as a boy and young man, and allows for one to kind of come out of the shell and to become your own person, more free of the disorder itself, which is really the goal of any sort of therapy for stuttering, is to not allow the stuttering to dictate that person's life.
YDSTIE: Mm-hmm. How common is stuttering? What percentage of the population is afflicted with it?
Dr. MAGUIRE: Yeah, it's about 1 percent of the adult population, and about 3 percent of all children will stutter. And about 60 percent of the children who stutter will, at puberty or some time around then, will outgrow it, so to speak. Yeah.
YDSTIE: Why's it taken so long to come up with a pharmaceutical treatment?
Dr. MAGUIRE: I think because stuttering has largely been viewed just as a learned disorder, or a disorder that could be manipulated just by learning to relax and so forth. And medical science really has not dedicated its focus on stuttering in any way. And when I was in medical school, I learned absolutely nothing about stuttering, and I believe the majority of physicians know very little about stuttering. So the people who are trained to really understand this really didn't have any background in this, they didn't even think that this is something that you could actually study and try to help solve.
YDSTIE: Thanks very much, Dr. Maguire.
Dr. MAGUIRE: And thank you, John.
YDSTIE: Gerald Maguire is an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California-Irvine.
