Clinical Significance of Measurement of Swallowing Pressure

Abstract

The measurement of swallowing pressure is one of the methods to analyze the swallowing mechanism, but it has not been utilized clinically yet. The purposes of this paper are to clarify practical problems of the measurement of swallowing pressure through a survey of literature and to evaluate a posssibility of utilizing it for clinical use. It was considered that an intraluminal miniature pressure transducer was more accurate in measuring swallowing pressure than an infused water-filled catheter. The measurement of swallowing pressure can be an useful diagnostic method for investigating swallowing mechanism at the pharyngeal and cervical esophageal regions, especially in combination with cine-fluorography.