The safety and efficacy of adjunctive lemon fruit juice use with tube feeding in stroke patients

Abstract

We assessed the utility of lemon fruit juice for the purpose of stabilizing tubal-feeding agents and shortening the feeding time. We examined the efficacy and safety of adjunctive administration of lemon fruit juice. Along with our previous report, we injected lemon fruit juice, whose amount was 5% of the nutrition, just before the administration of nutrition through naso-gastric tube in seven patients with acute stroke who needed to be fed transnasally because of dysphagia. During the observation, the gastrointestinal symptoms including diarrhea and vomiting were not increased after the injection of lemon fruit juice. Although it usually takes 1.5-2 hours to administrate the nutrition transnasally, we were able to administrate it within 20 minutes by using the adjunctive injection of lemon fruit juice. Our study indicates that adjunctive use of lemon fruit juice can shorten the feeding time leading to spend more time for rehabilitation. No obvious side effect was seen in this study, indicating the possibility of efficacy and safety in this more simple and convenient strategy of tube feeding. Large-scale study should be done for further evaluation of this new strategy.