Complete 12 page APA formatted essay: Stuttering.Download file to see previous pages... But of particular concern in this paper would be the medical aspect of stuttering. Termed as developmental stutt

Complete 12 page APA formatted essay: Stuttering.

But of particular concern in this paper would be the medical aspect of stuttering. Termed as developmental stuttering in this context, it refers to a disorder exhibited through the disruption of normal speech mannerisms and fluency where words, syllables or sounds would last or be repeated longer than normal (Zieve, 2012). The British refer to it as stammering. The resultant break in flow of speech is referred to as disfluency. Prevalence and incidence In giving the prevalence and incidence of stuttering, Guitar (2006) differentiates the two noting that while prevalence indicates the spread of the disorder, incidence gives a position on the number of people that have had stuttered as some point in life. Statistics indicate that 5% of children at the ages of between 2 and 5 would develop stuttering in their childhood and could last from weeks up to years. The stuttering in 1% of these children would normally worsen with time. According to the National Institutes of Health, NIH (2012), 25% of childhood stammering persists in adulthood. The prevalence of stuttering among adults stands at 1%. In the UK, this represents about 500,000 adults with stuttering disorder and 3 million and 45 million in the US and globally respectively. The incidence rate has been estimated at between 4 and 5 percent by Iverach et al. (2009) with a 4:1 male to female ratio. But Dworzynski, Remington, Rijsdijk, Howell and Plomin (2007) observed that in childhood, the ratio stands at 2:1 for preschool boys to girls. Similarly, the researchers found out that recovery for girls would be higher than in boys, a phenomenon that points out at sex-modified transmission. The global incidence levels stand at 15% inclusive of those who have had temporary stuttering conditions. But when the period of focus exceeds six months of stuttering, this reduces to 5% which has been argued as being more accurate in reflection of the stuttering chronic disorder. Causes Though the causes of stuttering remain scanty, many researchers have cited genetic conditions as major risk factors (Craig &amp. Tran, 2006. Iverach et al. 2009. Lavid, 2003). The onset of stuttering occurs at tender ages of between two and five and though majority of the children naturally recover later in life, it could become intractable and a persistent problem to a portion of the adult population. According to Guitar (2006), about two-thirds of the people who stutter have relatives, either of first or second degree, who stutter. Furthermore, it has been observed that monozygotic concordance rates would be much higher than dizygotic concordance rates. Pro-band families also exhibit higher tendencies of being infected as compared to the population rates. This implies that hereditary factors play a part in development of stuttering though the genetic transmission method and the specific genes accounting for these patterns and susceptibility remain unclear (Dworzynski et al., 2007). This has caused a rise in questions on whether differences exist between the genes where victims later recover from those where victims remain stuttering permanently. The observation of girls recovering more than boys also indicates that the genetic structure in boys could be different from that in girls with boys exhibiting higher heritability than girls. Lately, behavioural genetic analyses adopt approaches beyond the estimation of heritability alone to considering other issues like developmental change and continuity.