You might be familiar with dry mouth from partaking in a certain kind of recreational substance (or you might not be, we're not judging), but the condition can actually have verifiable medical causes. A new gel-based blob could be a great way to cure it.
Dry mouth, technically known as xerostomia, occurs when your salivary glands don't pump out enough saliva to keep the mouth properly filled with moisture. It can occur from medical conditions including Alzheimer's disease or diabetes; it can be caused by cancer treatments like radiation or chemotherapy; and it can be the side effect of hundreds of different medications. It's also frequently a symptom of aging.
While lack of sufficient saliva is inconvenient at best, having an excessively dry mouth can lead to fairly serious issues such as an increase in tooth decay caused by plaque build-up as well as gum disease. It can also cause mouth sores and a yeast infection known as thrush. Lack of saliva also affects the digestive process, which normally begins as food is first chewed and saliva begins to break it down. If chewing is affected, this too can impact digestion and nutrition.
Now, researchers from Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin believe they have come up with a potential cure. They engineered a hydrogel reservoir and loaded it up with artificial saliva, which consists of mostly water and mucins, antimicrobial substances that lubricate the mouth. Hydrogels are water-based substances that can also hold a large quantity of liquids. They've been studied for use as everything from a bone-mending solution to an atmospheric water harvester.
In this study, the team found that its hydrogel could hold four times its volume in artificial saliva and then release that slowly over the course of four hours at body temperature, 98.6 °F (37 °C). What's more, testing revealed that one hydrogel blob could be reloaded at least five different times, demonstrating its reusability. Finally, when tested against cultured cells, the hydrogel had no impact on their survival or growth rates, showing that the invention is biocompatible.
While all tests on the hydrogel were done in the lab, the team believes it would have a similar effect inside the mouth and plans to further improve the substance.
"In future work, we plan to continue refining this saliva-gel in terms of durability and the amount of artificial saliva it can release with a single use," say study co-authors Suman Debnath and Georgia Malandraki. "We also intend to test additional materials that would make it fully dissolvable. Our goal is to develop an easy and affordable solution for dry mouth for the millions who suffer from this frustrating condition."
The study has been published in the journal ACS Applied Polymer Materials.
Source: American Chemical Society
