Oral intake may be aided by teaching persons with A-T how to drink, chew and swallow more safely. The propriety of treatments for swallowing problems should be determined following evaluation by an expert in the field of speech-language pathology. Dieticians may help treat nutrition problems by recommending dietary modifications, including high calorie foods or food supplements.

A feeding (gastrostomy) tube is recommended when any of the following occur:

- A child cannot eat enough to grow or a person of any age cannot eat enough to maintain weight;

- Aspiration is problematic;

- Mealtimes are stressful or too long, interfering with other activities.

Feeding tubes can decrease the risk of aspiration by enabling persons to avoid liquids or foods that are difficult to swallow and provide adequate calories without the stress and time commitment of prolonged meals. Gastrostomy tubes do not prevent people from eating by mouth. Once a tube is in place, the general goal should be to maintain weight at the 10-25th percentile.

An open-label Phase II clinical trial studying the use of red blood cells (erythrocytes) loaded with dexamethasone sodium phosphate found that this treatment improved symptoms and appeared to be well tolerated. This treatment uses a unique delivery system for medication by using the patient's own red blood cells as the delivery vehicle for the drug. Given the other immunologic deficits present in individuals with A-T, there remains a need to evaluate the therapeutic potential of steroids further, particularly with respect to the duration of any benefit and its long-term safety.

Oculomotor apraxia (OMA), also known as Cogan ocular motor apraxia or saccadic initiation failure (SIF) is the absence or defect of controlled, voluntary, and purposeful eye movement. It was first described in 1952 by the American ophthalmologist David Glendenning Cogan. People with this condition have difficulty moving their eyes horizontally and moving them quickly. The main difficulty is in saccade initiation, but there is also impaired cancellation of the vestibulo-ocular reflex. Patients have to turn their head in order to compensate for the lack of eye movement initiation in order to follow an object or see objects in their peripheral vision, but they often exceed their target. There is controversy regarding whether OMA should be considered an apraxia, since apraxia is the inability to perform a learned or skilled motor action to command, and saccade initiation is neither a learned nor a skilled action.

Even though OMA is not always associated with developmental issues, children with this condition often have hypotonia, decreased muscle tone, and show developmental delays. Some common delays are seen in speech, reading and motor development