Histological investigation of the supra-glottal structures in humans for understanding abnormal phonation

Abstract

Phonation is the vocal fold vibration on normal voice. But sometimes we can observe the other phonation styles like as the pressed voice or some throat singings like as ‘‘kargyraa’’ or ‘‘drone’’ in Khoomei in Mongolian music. Also, clinically, we know that some patients who have the wide glottal slit in phonation because of the recurrence nerve palsy or after partial laryngectomy, could make the ‘‘supra-glottal phonation.’’ The ‘‘supra-glottal phonation’’ would be made from the vibration of ‘‘supra-glottal structures’’ such as the false vocal folds, the arytenoids and the epiglottis, etc. Endoscopic examination suggests the existence of some contractile functions in supra-glottal space. However, these phonation systems have not been clear to explain their neuromuscular mechanism in histology. This study aimed to find the basis for making the supra-glottal phonation from the points of view of the histological structures. We tried to investigate if there were any muscles that could contract the supra-glottal structures. The samples are the excised larynx of human beings. They were fixed by formalin after excision. We observed their macroscopic anatomy, and also with the microscopic observation their histological preparations after the process of the embedding in paraffin, slicing for the preparation and HE (hematoxylin-eosin) staining.