I think the people who are responding mean well, but there's a lot of misleading information here. I also started stuttering later than typical (about age 18 in my case), and from what I've learned, while rare, it's not considered abnormal. At last summer's conference of the National Stuttering Association, I asked about late-onset stuttering to a panel of researchers, and I'm copying below the answers from them: [Dr. Scott Yaruss](https://comartsci.msu.edu/our-people/j-scott-yaruss): "I also have had reports – and worked with clients – who simply seemed to start stuttering with no apparent prior history at all. Maybe it was unnoticed, as Dr. Kraft indicated... but, sometimes, we do indeed see unexplainable stuttering onset. In my career, I’ve treated about a half dozen people with this type of unexplained onset. One of the many great mysteries of the condition!" [Dr. Shelly Jo Kraft](https://clasprofiles.wayne.edu/profile/eo7455): "Most of the time my assumption is that they stuttered for a short amount of time (2 weeks, 2 months?) while they were very young children (2-3 years old in the context of lots of new speech, and working through sounds and words) and it flew under the radar because it quickly went away, or they stuttered so mildly as children (maybe again for a short time) that it flew under the radar. Hormones and growth spurts seem to disrupt and affect stuttering severity. Many kids who stutter see an increase in severity during their teen years, so it would make sense for a huge surge in both growth and hormones to bring a stutter back from the past or make it suddenly so severe it appears like it is a whole new thing compared to the very mild, very rare, disruption they were used to. I would guess that something like this was part of your history, though it is impossible to verify in hind-sight. Therapy for late-onset would be the same as therapy for adults. We treat therapy for young pre-school age children near onset very differently because they are within the “zone of proximal development” for speech and the neuroplasticity is so flexible that we can often help the brain to route a new path for fluent speech while it is pumping new neurons into the system for speech anyway. It’s like adding a side walk to a road that is already under construction. For adults those roads are basically in place and we haven’t quite figured out how to re-route them easily."