Findings

Reduced hyolaryngeal excursion

Also written as Reduced laryngeal elevation, Reduced hyolaryngeal elevation, Reduced laryngeal excursion, Decreased hyoid excursion, Inadequate hyolaryngeal elevation.

Reduced hyolaryngeal excursion means the voice box and the small hyoid bone did not lift and move forward as far as expected during a swallow.

Rest your fingers lightly on the front of your neck and swallow. Something rises, then settles back down. That is your hyoid bone and your voice box, called the larynx, moving together. Clinicians call that movement hyolaryngeal excursion, and it happens on every single swallow you take.

That lift does two useful things at once. It pulls the airway up and forward, out of the path the food is traveling, and it helps stretch open the muscular valve at the top of the food pipe so the bolus can pass through. A group of muscles under the jaw and along the throat pulls it off.

Reduced simply means the clinician saw less of this movement on the study images than would be expected. It describes one specific motion out of many that make up a swallow, and it is read alongside the rest of the report rather than on its own.

SLPs watch this closely because it is one of the movements that both clears a path for food and lifts the airway out of the line of travel. Published work notes that inadequate hyolaryngeal elevation can be associated with aspiration or with material left behind in the throat. Seeing the phrase on a report does not tell you what actually happened during your own study; the rest of the report and your clinician do that.