PURPOSE Children with special health care needs (CSHCN) are most in need of anticipatory guidance and prevention. Achieving and maintaining optimal oral health is challenging, due to the many challenges this group faces both in medical and dental care. The purpose of this pilot project was to identify the educational needs of health professionals on a feeding team to prepare them to provide ant...

BACKGROUND Recommendations have been made to increase the number of nursing home (NH) staff available to provide feeding assistance during meals and to individualize care for residents. However, there are few data reflecting the number of residents responsive to feeding assistance during meals and what alternative interventions might be appropriate for other residents. The purpose of this study...

Oral feeding for preterm infants has been a thorny problem worldwide. To improve the efficacy of oral feeding in preterm infants, oral motor intervention (OMI), which consists of nonnutritive sucking, oral stimulation, and oral support, was developed. Published studies demonstrated that OMI may be as an alternative treatment to solve this problem; however, these results remain controversial. We...

OBJECTIVES The time to begin oral feeding after total laryngectomy remains a subject of debate among head and neck surgeons. The prevailing assumption is that early initiation of oral feeding may cause pharyngocutaneous fistula; thus, the common practice of initiating oral feeding after a period of 7 to 10 days. The objective of the study was to demonstrate the feasibility and safety of oral fe...

Background: A great number of premature neonates do not tolerate sufficient milk during the early neonatal period. Objective: To evaluate the effect of oral erythromycin on enhancement of feeding tolerance in preterm newborns. Methods: Sixty preterm neonates intolerant to milk of >75 ml/kg/day during 5 days after the start of feedings, were randomized into a treatment and a control groups. Oral...

Current knowledge suggests that, to be successful, oral feeding in preterm infants should be initiated as soon as possible, often at an age where immature respiration still requires ventilatory support in the form of nasal continuous positive airway pressure (nCPAP). While some neonatologist teams claim great success with initiation of oral feeding in immature infants with nCPAP, others strictl...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to evaluate a long-term on-going international academic service-learning (I-ASL) intervention. Its goal was to improve swallowing, feeding and oral care technique of medical staff in an orphanage in Guatemala to children who are medically complex and have special needs. METHOD The PRECEDE-PROCEED model was used as the conceptual framework of the program. ...

AIM Preterm infants have difficulty oral feeding. We hypothesized that a specific sucking and swallowing exercises vs. no intervention accelerate the attainment of independent oral feeding through a faster maturation of infants' oral feeding skills (OFS). METHODS Very low birthweight infants were randomized to a control, sucking and swallowing groups. Sucking consisted of active sucking on a ...

PURPOSE To verify the corrected gestational age when oral feeding (breast half full) and exclusive breastfeeding were initiated in preterm newborns submitted to the transition technique from enteral feeding directly to breastfeeding, and time spent (in days) under speech-language pathology intervention until discharge. METHODS Study participants were 35 preterm infants (PTI) divided into two ...