Meeting Abstract
All mammals make a transition from milk to solid food, or weaning. This critical change occurs due to the limited availability of mother’s milk, and causes changes in the biomechanics of feeding, as well as the coordination of breathing and swallowing. Since the food and air pathways cross, we ask whether the timing of a swallow relative to respiration changes with the introduction of new food types. Four piglets, aged 26-31 days, were recorded using high speed videofluoroscopy while drinking milk or feed pellets mixed with barium. These images provided the exact swallow time, which we correlated with simultaneously recorded breathing data from a thoracic plethysmograph. Data included six feeding sequences per animal: 1 sequence drinking milk from a bowl until satiety; 4 sequences drinking 4oz from a bowl, immediately followed by no more than 8oz from a nipple; 1 sequence eating pellets. We measured the delay between time of the swallow and onset of thoracic inspiration. The timing of coordination between swallowing and respiration is similar in drinking from a bowl or a nipple. However, coordination is more variable in drinking from a bowl. When eating solid food, the time between swallowing and onset of inspiration is shorter, with low variability. These preliminary data suggest there is a difference in how the infants coordinate respiration cycles and swallowing among the different feeding methods used. The two adult feeding behaviors (bowl drinking, eating pellets) differ from the infant behavior (nipple drinking) in diverse ways. There is a complex pattern of change in neural coordination of swallowing and respiration at weaning in response to changes in feeding behavior, along with food type. Further experimentation is needed to draw more solid conclusions, such as working with older pigs to measure this coordination post weaning.
