EFFICACY OF BITTER TASTE BLOCKERS ON FLAVOR ACCEPTANCE IN PEDIATRIC POPULATIONS

描述(由申请人提供)：味道在临床医学中起着核心作用，对儿科患者来说至关重要，因为药物令人不快的味道阻碍了即使是最强大的药物的益处。出于两个原因，儿科药物尤其有问题。首先，儿童通常不能或不愿吞下药丸或药片(这些药片包含了天生的苦味药物)。其次，他们(相对于成年人)对苦味的敏感度增强，导致他们强烈抵制苦味液体药物。我们建议应用苦味生物学的最新科学进展进行实验研究，确定可能干扰味觉感受器细胞感受苦味的化合物，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效果。 与公共健康相关：这项研究项目的完成将使人们更好地理解如何改善苦味。它通过以下方式解决公共卫生优先事项：1)支持旨在制定味道更好的儿科药物的努力，从而帮助儿童避免拒绝服药带来的严重健康后果；2)提供一个框架和数据库，使用适当的心理物理测试程序、模型苦味化合物和目前已确定的苦味阻滞剂，这将促进未来的临床研究，在这些研究中，可以比较具体的药物，可以评估新型苦味阻滞剂。

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. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Completion of this research project will lead to a better understanding of the how to ameliorate bitter tastes. It addresses a public health priority by 1) supporting efforts aimed at formulating better tasting pediatric medications, thus helping children avoid the serious health consequences from refusing to take medications; and 2) providing a framework and database using appropriate psychophysical testing procedures, model bitter compounds and currently identified bitter blockers, which will facilitate future clinical studies in which specific drugs can be compared and novel bitter blockers can be evaluated.