EFFICACY OF BITTER TASTE BLOCKERS ON FLAVOR ACCEPTANCE IN PEDIATRIC POPULATIONS

描述（由申请人提供）：味觉在临床医学中起着核心作用，对儿科患者至关重要，因为药物的难闻味道会阻碍即使是最强大的药物的益处。出于两个原因，儿科药物特别成问题。首先，儿童通常不能或不愿吞下药丸或药片（其中包含固有的苦味药物）。第二，他们对苦味的敏感性增强（相对于成年人），导致他们强烈拒绝苦味的液体药物。我们提出了应用苦味生物学的最新科学进展的实验研究，这些研究已经确定了可能干扰味觉受体细胞的苦味感知的化合物，以确定：（1）这些苦味阻滞剂在儿童和成人中对不同模型苦味化合物的有效性，以及（2）年龄和遗传变异如何影响苦味阻滞剂的功效。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Taste plays a central role in clinical medicine and is crucial for pediatric patients because the unpleasant taste of drugs thwarts the benefits of even the most powerful drug. For two reasons, pediatric medications are particularly problematic. First, children often cannot or will not swallow pills or tablets (which encapsulates the inherently bitter tasting medications). Second, their enhanced (relative to adults) sensitivity to bitterness leads them to strongly reject bitter liquid medicines. We propose experimental studies applying recent scientific advances in bitter taste biology which have identified compounds that may interfere with bitter perception by taste receptor cells, to determine: (1) the effectiveness of these bitter blockers in children and adults for different model bitter compounds and (2) how age and genetic variation affects the efficacy of the bitter blockers.