Clarification of the Mode of Masticatory Movements in Patients Wearing Denture (s) and the Design of Foods for the Elderly

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Since the life span of human teeth is about 50 years, many of the elderly must masticate foods with denture(s). To date, it has remained totally unclear what masticatory movements are made for proper food textures when denture-wearing persons masticate foods with different textures, and what feelings they receive from the foods. Therefore, we videofluorographically recorded masticatory movements occurring when denture-wearing subjects masicated samples with different textures, in order to clarify masticatory movements characteristics of denture-wearing persons, and then we discussed food designs that are easy to masticate by denture-wearing persons.The videofluorographic study on resin-plate-wearing subjects revealed that time needed to recognize a texture was prolonged, in addition to associated prolongation of time until the start of breaking a sample into pieces, when the sensory stimulative information was blocked by covering the incisive papilla, regardless of the hardness of samples, compared with that observed under non-blocked condition. When the sensory stimulative information was not blocked, an adequate method of breaking, either compression or crushing, was selected according to the hardness of samples, whereas all samples were broken by crushing, regardless of their hardness, when blocked.From these results, denture-wearing persons were thought to have slight difficulty in recognition of texture, compared with non-denture-wearing persons. Thus foods designed to have slightly emphasized hardness to facilitate the recognition of texture through a resin-plate seemed to be desirable for denture- wearing persons.