Cepstral Characteristics of Voice before, during and after Menopause: A Cross-sectional Study

*, Radish Kumar Balasubramanium and Bhat, Jayashree S. (2014) Cepstral Characteristics of Voice before, during and after Menopause: A Cross-sectional Study. International Journal of Phonosurgery and Laryngology , 4 (2). pp. 50-54.

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Abstract

Background: Previous studies on effects of menopause on voice characteristics have not compared the voice characteristics before, during and after menopause. It is also possible that these voice changes cannot be captured by traditional acoustic measures such as frequency and amplitude perturbation measures. Hence a robust acoustic tool such as cepstrum was chosen to capture these vocal changes before, during and after menopause and hence the present study was attempted. Method: The present study followed a cross-sectional study design. The participants consisted of 25 premenopausal women, 25 perimenopausal women and 25 postmenopausal women. Sustained production of/a/ and narration was recorded using Z tool and cepstral peak prominence (CPP) and smoothened cepstral peak prominence (CPPS) was analyzed. Results: The results of one-way ANOVA revealed that there was a significant main effect of the group at p < 0.05 for all the cepstral measures targeted in the study. Post hoc analysis indicated that there was no significant difference between pre and perimenopausal women for all the cepstral measures at p < 0.05. However, there was a significant difference between pre and postmenopausal women and peri and postmenopausal women at p < 0.05. These results suggests that postmenopausal women had overall good voice quality than pre and perimenopausal women. Conclusion: Results indicated that post menopausal women had increased cepstral measures when compared to pre and perimenopausal women. Further, studies are required to correlate laryngeal examination and hormonal levels with that of the voice changes before, during and after menopausal women.

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