SLPNarrative ReviewDysphagia2023

Bioenergetic Evaluation of Muscle Fatigue in Murine Tongue.

Tiffany J Glass, Linda M Rowe, Jared Cullen, Nadine P Connor

PMID 36401630

WHAT IT FOUND

This paper reviews methods for studying tongue muscle fatigue in rodents and describes a small pilot in 10 old rats.

It contains no clinical data on people with dysphagia, so there is nothing here to change your practice on.

What this paper is

This is a narrative review and methods overview describing how to study tongue muscle fatigue in mice and rats. It includes a small pilot experiment in 10 old male rats showing that treadmill running reduced glycogen in hindlimb and tongue muscles, but it reports no clinical trials, no human participants, and no outcomes relevant to patient care. There is nothing here to change your practice on.

The easy way to misread this

Do not read the rodent findings as evidence that aerobic exercise or electrical stimulation treats tongue fatigue or dysphagia in humans. The animal work is a methods pilot with no clinical outcomes, and the review itself states that future efforts may draw upon this research to allow development of hypotheses that can be tested in humans.

Read it on PubMed →