Abstract
The dense representation of trigeminal mechanosensitive afferents in the lip vermilion, anterior tongue, intraoral mucosa, and temporomandibular joint allows the infant's orofacial system to encode a wide range of somatosensory experiences during the critical period associated with feed development. Our understanding of how this complex sensorium processes texture is very limited in adults, and the putative role of texture encoding in the infant is unknown. The purpose of this study was to examine the short-term effects of a novel textured pacifier experience in healthy term infants (N = 28). Nonnutritive suck (NNS) compression pressure waveforms were digitized in real time using a variety of custom-molded textured pacifiers varying in spatial array density of touch domes. MANCOVA, adjusted for postmenstrual age at test and sex, revealed that infants exhibited an increase in NNS burst attempts at the expense of a degraded suck burst structure with the textured pacifiers, suggesting that the suck central pattern generator (sCPG) is significantly disrupted and reorganized by this novel orocutaneous experience. The current findings provide new insight into oromotor control as a function of the oral somatosensory environment in neurotypically developing infants.
Highlights
The human orofacial system has a remarkably rich supply of mechanoreceptors, making it one of the most sensitive tissue areas of the body in terms of tactile acuity and spatial resolution [1]
We chose to examine whether texturing of any type, regardless of location or spacing of the tactile domes, had an effect on Nonnutritive suck (NNS)
Infants displayed a significantly greater number of total compressions, NNS cycles, NNS cycles per burst, and NNS cycles as a percentage of the total nipple compressions, as well as a higher compression pressure amplitude and lower spatiotemporal index (STI) with the smooth pacifier than with the textured pacifiers. These findings suggest that the regular Soothie pacifier is preferred over the novel textured pacifiers utilized in this study by infants (1–4 months of age) as manifested in patterned, stable NNS
Summary
The human orofacial system has a remarkably rich supply of mechanoreceptors, making it one of the most sensitive tissue areas of the body in terms of tactile acuity and spatial resolution [1]. Fast-adapting type I (Meissner’s corpuscles) and slow-adapting types I and II (Merkel cells and Ruffini endings, resp.) Aβ mechanoreceptors have dense innervations within perioral and intraoral structures, including the hairy skin of the face, glabrous skin of the lips, oral mucosa, and the anterior tip of the tongue. Both type I receptors— Meissner corpuscles and Merkel cells—have relatively small receptive fields with clearly defined borders and are primarily responsible for encoding tactile spatial information, including fine form and texture. Evidence of oral cutaneous sensitivity begins in utero, as researchers have found mouth opening at 78 weeks gestational age (GA) and oral reflexes at 12-13 weeks GA in response to trigeminal nerve stimulation [9,10,11]
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