Les capacités de succion des nourrissons porteurs d’une atrésie de l’œsophage. Une revue de la littérature.

Abstract

Background: Esophageal atresia is a digestive birth defect that can affect infant feeding. Early speech and language therapy are recommended to train the oral-motor skills of these babies and to facilitate their post-operative feeding. Objective: To provide appropriate oral stimulation, it’s important to know what efficient sucking is and to identify the components of sucking that may be affected by neonatal malformations or pathologies such as esophageal atresia. To adapt speech and language therapy to the infant’s skills, it is also necessary to be able to assess the infant’s sucking, either through rating scales or technological measures. So far, no study has objectively measured the sucking ability of babies with esophageal atresia. Method: A review of documents on this topic was conducted from December 2021 to April 2022. Searches performed on PubMed, Ashawire and Web of Science databases and published works resulted in the selection of thirty-two articles. Results: In accordance with our two working objectives, these papers address the possible causes of sucking disorders in infants, and methods of assessing this skill. The results identify diseases and anatomical abnormalities that impact sucking and the means of assessing sucking available for the general population and for babies with oesophageal atresia. Conclusion: Further studies may be conducted to investigate the clinical application of these tools in speech and language therapy practice.