Defining Normal Sequential Swallowing Biomechanics.
Kevin Renz Ambrocio, Anna Miles, Ankita M Bhutada and 2 others
PMID 37097448WHAT IT FOUND
During repeated sips, healthy adults did not all use the same hyolaryngeal pattern.
Older adults more often kept the airway closed between swallows, and second swallows were slower. Sequential swallowing is a variable challenge task, not a uniform pattern.
Key findings
01In 88 healthy adults and 176 analyzed sequential swallows, all three hyolaryngeal patterns were present, with Types I and II each seen in 41 participants and Type III in 6.
02The oldest group primarily used Type II, and they had longer hypopharyngeal transit by 0.15 seconds and total pharyngeal transit by 0.25 seconds than youngest adults.
03The second swallow took longer than the first, with oropharyngeal transit longer by 0.13 seconds and total pharyngeal transit longer by 0.14 seconds.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only healthy adults, so it does not show what happens in patients with dysphagia or airway protection problems. The study did not repeat the drinking trial for each participant, so normal variation within a person may have been missed. The liquid volume per swallow was not controlled, so individual sip size may have influenced timing and movement. The analysis did not include all swallows in each drinking set, so later swallows were not examined. The age groups were unbalanced, with more younger adults than older adults. The paper did not compare patients to these healthy norms, so diagnostic thresholds are not established.
Declared interests
The authors reported no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat Type II as abnormal or use these values as diagnostic cutoffs. The study described healthy adults and did not test people with dysphagia, so it does not show that any pattern predicts aspiration or that changing treatment based on these norms improves patient outcomes.