What About Foods? The Influence of Food Texture on the Safety, Timing, Kinematics, and Efficiency of Pharyngeal Phase Swallowing in Healthy Adults.
Pooja Gandhi, Emily Barrett, Renata Mancopes and 4 others
PMID 41874217WHAT IT FOUND
Texture slowed food's path to the upper swallowing sphincter only when timing started at the hyoid burst.
Started from when food gathered in the throat, texture made no difference. Soft and bite-sized food left least residue; a cracker left most. 20 healthy adults.
Key findings
01As food texture got firmer, the time from the hyoid burst to opening of the upper oesophageal sphincter got longer, with every texture differing significantly from the others: minced and moist fastest, then soft and bite-sized, then a regular cracker.
02Those texture differences disappeared when timing was measured from the end of bolus aggregation in the valleculae instead of the hyoid burst, for both the interval to sphincter opening and the interval to laryngeal vestibule closure.
03Total pharyngeal residue was smaller with soft and bite-sized food than with minced and moist or regular cracker, and the minced and moist and cracker boluses left more residue than previously published values for teaspoons of pureed or extremely thick barium.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 20 people were tested and all were healthy adults aged 55 or under. Nobody with dysphagia was studied, and the study was not powered to look at differences between men and women or across ages. Portion sizes were not controlled. Participants served themselves, and the minced and moist mouthfuls weighed more than the others, which may account for some of the sphincter findings rather than the texture itself. Only two mouthfuls of each food were tested, and for some measures the two mouthfuls varied considerably within the same person. Only one example of each IDDSI level was used, and the regular-texture stimulus was a single cracker with barium paste out of an essentially unlimited range of Level 7 foods. The barium-and-food mixtures were off-label recipes, so other foods within the same IDDSI levels may behave differently. All comparisons with pureed or extremely thick barium rely on previously published values from other studies rather than a group measured alongside these participants.
Declared interests
Funding came from two operating grants awarded to the senior author, Catriona M. Steele: R01DC011020 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders and R01AG077481 from the National Institute on Aging. No other funding or competing interests are declared in the text provided, and no company that sells the foods or barium products tested appears as a sponsor.
The easy way to misread this
These were 20 healthy adults with no swallowing problem, so the timings say nothing about what firmer food does in someone with dysphagia. Do not read the longer swallowing times with firmer food as a sign that these textures are slow or unsafe for your patients. Every bolus of every texture in this study was swallowed with no airway invasion, and no one with a swallowing impairment was tested.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →