Vocal Cords News and Research

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The vocal cords, are composed of twin infoldings of mucous membrane stretched horizontally across the larynx. They vibrate, modulating the flow of air being expelled from the lungs during phonation.

Engineered cartilage grafts improve surgery for narrowed child airways

A study led by researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) demonstrated a new method of using decellularized cartilage with patient-specific cells to help enlarge the pediatric airways narrowed as a result of severe subglottic stenosis.

17 Jun 2026

New steerable optical fiber reaches previously inaccessible larynx tumors

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) researchers have developed a flexible optical fiber that can be threaded through a medical endoscope and steered into the larynx to destroy hard-to-reach tumors on the vocal folds, an advance that could expand outpatient laser treatment options for patients whose only other choice might be surgery under general anesthesia.

8 Apr 2026

Lab-grown food pipe offers hope for children with esophageal conditions

Scientists from Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) and University College London (UCL) have created the first lab‑grown esophagus - the food pipe - shown to safely replace a full section of the organ and restore normal function, including swallowing, in a growing animal without the need for immunosuppression.

23 Mar 2026

Restoring cellular vibration reduces aggressiveness of advanced vocal cord cancer

The continuous movement of the vocal cords weakens and eventually stops as laryngeal cancer progresses.

4 Mar 2026

Rare airway condition: Sarah Carroll's journey to breathing freely

"It was just really hard to breathe," says Sarah Carroll, recalling the earliest symptoms of idiopathic subglottic stenosis (iSGS). "It felt like there was something in my throat that was stopping me from breathing."

2 Mar 2026

Wearable device enables natural speech in stroke patients with dysarthria

Researchers have developed a wearable, comfortable and washable device called Revoice that could help people regain the ability to communicate naturally and fluently following a stroke, without the need for invasive brain implants.

19 Jan 2026

Etomidate proves safer than ketamine for emergency intubations

Doctors treating seriously ill patients in an emergency setting may want to give the sedative etomidate, rather than ketamine, while placing a breathing tube, according to a randomized trial published Dec. 9 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

12 Dec 2025

Landmark RSI trial reshapes sedative selection for emergency airway management

9 Dec 2025

3D-printing soft robot delivers hydrogels to the vocal cord surgical site to reconstruct tissues

After vocal cord surgery, many patients develop stiff vocal folds that impact their ability to speak. Hydrogels can help prevent this by promoting healing, but delivering hydrogels to the vocal cords is difficult.

29 Oct 2025

Study highlights menopause-related vocal changes in women

A new University of South Florida study published in Menopause highlights a largely overlooked health issue: voice changes that many women experience during menopause, often triggered by falling levels of estrogen and progesterone.

10 Sep 2025

AI voice test could help spot dangerous throat lesions before symptoms appear

Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University found that variability in the harmonic-to-noise ratio (HNR) of speech could help distinguish benign from malignant vocal fold lesions, offering a potential early detection biomarker. The exploratory study used AI to analyze acoustic features from the Bridge2AI-Voice dataset and found differences most pronounced in male participants.

14 Aug 2025

From patient to physician: EJ Beck's medical journey at NYU Langone Health

As a child, EJ Beck was treated for a rare pediatric thyroid cancer at NYU Langone Health. About 10 years after the scan that declared her cancer-free, Beck was accepted into her No. 1 choice for a medical school: NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

27 Sep 2024

UVA professor wins NIH Maximizing Investigator's Research Award for breakthrough biomedicine research

University of Virginia assistant engineering professor Liheng Cai has earned the Maximizing Investigator's Research Award from the National Institutes of Health.

5 Aug 2024

Olympic athletes overcome health challenges to reach the pinnacle of their sport

The athletes have done the training and achieved their dreams, a trip to the Paris Olympics set to begin Friday July 26th.

2 Aug 2024

New technology can automatically identify infants at risk of developing neuromotor diseases

A team of researchers led by Huanyu "Larry" Cheng, the James L. Henderson, Jr. Memorial Associate Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics (ESM) at Penn State, tested the use of wearable sensors paired with a "tiny" machine learning algorithm to automatically monitor and evaluate general movements in infants.

13 Apr 2024