[New remedy for dry mouth using the gustatory-salivary reflex].

Patients with dry mouth are increasing in Japan due to the country's super-aging society and stressful modern society. Dry mouth affects quality of life, including difficulty with speech or swallowing, and also causes aspiration pneumonia and, respiratory infection. Moreover, dry mouth closely relates to taste dysfunction, resulting in malnutrition, a common risk of nursing care in the elderly.

Dependence of pulpal blood-flow responses on baseline blood-flow in the cat.

It has been shown earlier that electrical stimulation of the distal cut end of the inferior alveolar nerve (IAN) in the cat evokes three different patterns of pulpal blood-flow (PBF) response in the ipsilateral mandibular canine tooth (a decrease, a biphasic response, or an increase). The response to a given stimulus sometimes changed to another pattern even in one and the same experimental animal during the course of the experiment. It is known that the evoked decrease is due to activation of the sympathetics and that the increase is due to antidromic activation of sensory fibres; but, it is unknown why the response varies so much.