Mr Alasdair Mace, an ENT surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital in London, carries out two 'voice surgeries' a month, usually on patients undergoing a sex change, or patients with a defect in their voice through birth or injury.
Here, he explains to MailOnline how a procedure to lower the pitch of the voice would work...
Mr Mace said: ‘The pitch of the voice is determined by length, the thickness, and the tension of the vocal chords. ‘You can stretch the vocal chords - the thinner they become, the higher the voice will go.
‘The thicker and the more lax the vocal chords, the deeper you’ll go. ‘Botox makes the chords shorter, flatter and more floppy, deepening the voice.
‘The chords are also attached to a bit of horse-shoe shaped cartilage called thyroid cartilage. ‘If you cut a little bit of cartilage out and drop it back, this shortens, stiffens the chords and the voice will become deeper.’
He added that the Botox injection is usually temporary.
‘It’s a vacuous aim if you inject it into the vocal chords because it’ll wear off. So they keep having to come back.' He added that the procedure carries well-known risks. He said: ‘If you have too much you weaken the chords so they can no longer come together and you’ll lose your voice.
‘The reason we have vocal cords is originally to protect the lungs from things going down the wrong way. ‘There’s a risk of causing pneumonia by paralysing them.
'People having the procedure would have to know about the risks: losing the voice, the chest infections.’
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