What Type of Food Can Older Adults Masticate?: Evaluation of Mastication Performance Using Color-Changeable Chewing Gum.
Shinichi Wada, Nobuyuki Kawate, Masazumi Mizuma
PMID 28474132WHAT IT FOUND
Gum color after chewing tracked whether older adults made food ready to swallow for boiled rice, ginger-fried pork loin, boiled fish-paste, and rice cracker; sliced white bread did not follow this pattern.
Key findings
01The gum color value was significantly associated with suitable bolus texture for boiled rice, ginger-fried pork loin, boiled fish-paste, and rice cracker.
02For sliced white bread, high adhesiveness made suitable bolus texture rare: 4 participants (13%) reached it.
03Cut-off gum color values were reported for boiled rice, ginger-fried pork loin, boiled fish-paste, and rice cracker, but not for sliced white bread.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
Thirty participants from one clinic may not represent other older adults. One participant did not chew boiled fish-paste and six participants did not chew rice cracker because of fatigue, so those foods had missing texture data. The suitable texture criteria were based on observational hospital data, not scientific verification experiments. The sliced white bread result may depend on the type of bread because high adhesiveness was the main problem. This was a cross-sectional study, so it cannot show that the gum test predicts outcomes over time. The paper did not test whether using the gum test changes diet decisions or swallowing safety.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use this gum test alone to decide an older adult's diet. It showed an association in 30 stable inpatients, not a tested intervention, and it did not predict suitable bolus texture for sliced white bread.