Orofacial examination was applied in 39 patients with myotonic dystrophy. We made an original table with a scale of punctuation. The group showed a deficit of 43.70%. The female group was 6.16% better than male's. The maternal inherited cases were 3.63% better than the paternal ones. When we separated the groups by decades, there was a tendency to an increasingly better performance as the age of the beggining of symptoms was later. The performance was 10.68% better in the group of patients with 1 to 10 years than in the group with 11 to 20 years of disease. We concluded that the phonoaudiological affection in myotonic dystrophy was less intense in patients with later onset of symptons and less than 10 years of disease.
myotonic dystrophy; myotonia atrophica; Steinert's disease; orofacial examination; punctuation scale