Although mastication is primarily involved in food intake and digestion, it also promotes and preserves general health, including cognitive function. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission topography studies recently revealed that mastication leads to increases in cortical blood flow and activates the somatosensory, supplementary motor, and insular cortices, as well ...

Lipomas are relatively uncommon benign tumor occurring in the oral cavity with a prevalence rate of 1% to 4% of all oral lesions. They present as a slow growing, painless, asymptomatic submucosal mass and surgical excision is the treatment of choice. Oral lipomas have been known to grow to large sizes causing interference with speech, mastication and construction of denture. A case of 77 years ...

The difficulty in masticating and swallowing rice cake was quantified. Healthy subjects ate pieces of rice cake (9 g and 3 g) and a modified product (9 g). We used electromyography to measure the activity of the jaw-closing and -opening muscles during chewing, as well as the suprahyoid muscle activity, laryngeal movement, and sound during swallowing. The smaller the rice cake, the shorter the m...

The masticatory motion, whereby food introduced into the mouth is processed into a bolus suitable for swallowing, can be divided into successive masticatory cycles, each comprising downward and subsequent upward movements of the mandible. The present study deals with the problem of the existence of muscle synergies in mastication, that is whether some of the muscles involved in mastication rece...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effects of physical properties of foods on the changes of viscosity and mass as well as the particle size distribution after mastication. METHOD Twenty subjects with no masticatory disorders were recruited. Six grams of four solid foods of different textures (banana, tofu, cooked-rice, cookie) were provided, and the viscosity and mass after 10, 20, and 30 cycles of m...

Mastication is mainly involved in food intake and nutrient digestion with the aid of teeth. Mastication is also important for preserving and promoting general health, including hippocampus-dependent cognition. Both animal and human studies indicate that mastication influences hippocampal functions through the end product of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, glucocorticoid (GC). Epi...

The gastric acid response and the buffer capacity of the stomach were measured in 30 control subjects and 22 duodenal ulcer patients in response to a masticatory (solid) and a non-masticatory (homogenized) meal having the same chemical composition. The peak acid output values were equal after a masticatory and after a non-masticatory diet in control subjects (masticatory 18.1 +/- 1.2, non-masti...

0006-3207/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Ltd. A doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2009.03.001 * Corresponding author. Tel.:+ 01 510 642 7304; fa E-mail addresses: [email protected] (J berkeley.edu (S.L. Stephens). Fuel reduction in the wildland–urban interface is a widely used international strategy for assisting human communities regarding wildfire threats, but very little research has examined ...

PURPOSE The purpose of the present study was to perform a pattern analysis in patients with temporomandibular disorder (TMD) resulting from unilateral mastication due to chronic periodontitis. METHODS Thirty participants with signs or symptoms of TMD who engaged in unilateral mastication due to periodontitis-related discomfort (test group) were selected. Another 30 subjects exhibiting signs o...