EDITORIAL

It was with great pleasure that we have concluded the year of 2012 by offering the last issue of the JSBFa. This fourth issue presents with 18 contributions, 13 of them are original articles from different specialties, two are about evidence-based Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology, two are case reports and one is a brief communication.

The original papers had a great participation of the area of Audiology, with six manuscripts. Four of them are about hearing aids; one addresses specifically the insertion of telehealth on patients' treatment, as well as some contributions concerning hearing thresholds in children exposed to mercury during pregnancy and the association between genetic mutations and hearing impairment. The Language area has contributed with three original articles; one of them is about reading comprehension of deaf students, another one regards auditory perceptual performance on identification of phonological contrasts, and the third one is about language abilities and difficulties of learning. The Voice area also contributed with three articles, one about social abilities of dysphonic children, another one that proposes a pitch-matching screening, and the last that explores pain in popular singers. The Oral Motricity area came up with one original article that talks about the axial force of the tongue.

Regarding Audiology, the first contribution is from Campos and Ferrari and it is about the evaluation of the teleconsultation's efficacy for hearing aid (HA) fitting in 50 individuals, concluding that teleconsultation is efficient for HA programming, verification and fitting when face to face services are not available. The second contribution of Pinheiro, Iório, Miranda, Dias and Pereira has compared the speech recognition processes and the cognitive processing in the elderly, proving that the subjects with cognitive problems presented a worse performance at the speech recognition processes in a dichotic listening task. The third article of Laperuta and Fiorini analyzed the user satisfaction of hearing aid use, a longitudinal study with 22 elderly individuals, and concluded that they have a high level of satisfaction; however mean values for the effect obatained differed over time. The fourth study of Dutra, Cavadas, Jesus, Santos, Silva and Câmara, evaluated hearing thresholds of 90 children with history of exposure to mercury during prenatal period and concluded that the children hearing thresholds were within normal limits. The fifth study of Biaggio, Azevedo, Iório, Svidnicki and Satorato established the frequency of genetic mutations related to sensory and neural hearing loss and investigated the association between SNHL degree and the presence of genetic alteration in 30 children; the study identified genetic mutations in 36.7% of the sample, who showed higher degree of hearing loss, justifying the importance of the genetic tracking on the hearing habilitation process. The last article on this area, of Novaes, Versolatto-Cavanaugh, Figueiredo and Mendes explored determining factors for the development of communicative abilities in children with hearing loss, concluding that family involvement, quality of parental participation in the intervention program as well as expectations about the future are important aspects to be considered.

The Language area brings an interface with Audiology in the study of Luccas, Chiari and Goulart. The authors analyzed the reading comprehension of 35 deaf students included in regular classes in public schools with and without specialized educational support. They observed that there is impact of specialized educational support in the inclusion process. The second study of Berti, Falavigna, Santos and Oliveira investigated the auditory perceptual performance of 59 children regarding the identification of contrasts among stops in Brazilian Portuguese and concluded that this ability takes place gradually, suggesting that there seems to be a hierarchy among these sounds. The last study on this area from Silva, Cunha, Pinheiro and Capellini compared and correlated the rapid naming, reading and comprehension of 32 students with learning difficulties, in reading takes, and concluded that the discrepancy in the proposed tasks in the first evaluation generated failures in the mechanism of conversion phoneme-grapheme, what influenced de performance in the second reading take.

The first article in the Voice area is from Silva, Batista, Oliveira and Dassie-Leite analyzed data evaluation of dysphonic children›s social skills using the Inventário Multimídia de Habilidades Sociais para Crianças (IMHSC) (Social Skills Multimedia Inventory for Children) and concluded that it was not possible to determine specific social behaviors in dysphonic children. The second study of Moreti, Pereira and Gielow proposed a simple and quick-to-apply procedure for pitch-matching scanning useful to identify the performance of adults, with better results in musicians. The last article of Rocha, Moraes and Behlau studied the presence of body pain in a population of 100 popular singers and concluded that popular singers reported presence of body pain mainly in locations next to the larynx and that there is a relationship between the presence of body pain and voice disorders, absence of vocal training, and seeking for professional help.

The Oral Motricity area contributed with an interesting study from Almeida, Furlan, Las Casas and Motta, which analyzed the influence of weight, height and body mass index in the axial tongue force in 44 adults and concluded that body mass index and weight were positively correlated with the average axial tongue force.

The cases published are very interesting, one of them of Lamônica, Stump, Pedro, Rolim-Liporacci, Caldeira, Anastácio-Pessan and Gejão analyzed ten infants with phenylketonuria, highlighting that the continued breast-feeding is useful for the treatment of these children since phenylalanine levels are strictly controlled and the effects on child development are checked. The second case of Melo and Lara presents an analysis of the auditory and linguistic skills in two cochlear implanted children, showing that children submitted to a therapeutical program had better performance compared to the other children.

The fisrt article of Evidence-Based Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology from Coelho, Brasolotto and Bevilacqua brings a systematic review of the literature regarding vocal features of hearing impaired children or adults with cochlear implants. After analyzing 27 articles, they found out that the voice of hearing impaired children and adults with cochlear implants has been little studied and there is not enough data about the effects of the cochlear implant use on the quality of voice of children and adults with hearing impairment. In the second article Veiga and Bianchini performed an integrative review of studies about liquid sequential swallowing, and after analyzing 18 articles the authors concluded that there is great variability in the methodology employed to characterize the sequential swallowing, which limits the comparison between the findings.

The Brieft Communication article of Marchesan, Martinelli and Gusmão about changes after frenectomy concerning mobility and functions of the tongue, characterized 53 subjects with a specific lingual frenulum protocol administered before and after surgery. The study showed an improvement of the tongue tip shape and its movements, after a month of treatment, as well as better lip closure, drooling and speech, without speech-language pathologist intervention.

This is the last edition under the name Jornal da SBFa. From 2013 on our journal will be called CoDAS, and will count on the contribution of associated editors and new, national, and international reviewers. It will also have a shared scientific editorial board that will include professor Fernanda Dreux Miranda Fernandes. All of these changes are part of an ambitious plan to widen up the visibility of our production and bring international authors to our journal. Meanwhile, our other journal, Revista da Sociedade Brasileira de Fonoaudiologia will be edited by the Brazilian Academy of Audiology - ABA. During the last two years, SBFa has published the two journals: Jornal da SBFa and Revista da Sociedade Brasileira de Fonoaudiologia. Although the effort involved in the publication of the two journals has always been a pleasure, it was a huge task that jeopardized the quality of both publications, thus the growth expected was not obtained. Our science needs to grow and ABA gently offered to take over this effort, getting the edition of one of SBFa's journals.

We would like to enjoy the appropriate moment to thank all of the Revista da SBFa editors, founded in 1997. At its first biennium there was not a specific editor in charge of it, because the articles were analyzed in a rotation-like manner, however, later this position was taken by Teresa Mohmenson (1999-2001), Debora Befi-Lopes (2002-2005) and Fernanda Dreux Miranda Fernandes (2006-present) with a record of seven years of dedication, persistence and serenity in the conduction of this project. ABA knows that they can count on SBFa and the scientific producers in Brazil for this new journey.

Long, healthy and visible life to our journals.

Mara Behlau

Scientific editor of JSBF

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  07 Jan 2013
• Date of issue
  2012