Hannah Baker, an MS student in the Speech Pathology and Audiology Program at Miami University supervised by Dr. Donna Scarborough, used some data from our NIH funded study on treatment strategies to recover swallow-respiratory function in a juvenile pig model. We reared infant pigs from weaning to 12 weeks on a liquidized diet and then directly transitioned some animals to regular pig chow at 13 weeks and in the other group we progressively increased the thickness of the diet from 13 to 16 weeks, ending with regular pig chow at 16 weeks. In her MS thesis, Hannah compared swallow frequency and epiglottic inversion timing and showed that transition approaches resulted in different outcomes.
