Intra‐oral trigeminal‐mediated sensations influencing taste perception: A systematic review

Abstract

In humans, food intake behaviour includes selecting, purchasing and cooking foods, organising meal patterns and actual ingestion. 1 Decisions concerning what, when and how much to eat may depend on physiological mechanisms (hunger and satiety), environmental influences, 2 social behaviour, 3,4 cognitive tasks, psychological attitudes and food sensory perception. Food perception is a multimodal sensation which implies cross-modal interplays, including aroma/ taste and texture/flavour interactions. 5During oral processing, food products are comminuted by the teeth and the tongue into small particle size, humidified and dissolved in saliva in order to form a swallowable food bolus. 3 Food's perceived flavour result from the simultaneous stimulation of three principal sensory processes: retronasal olfaction, taste and trigeminal sense. The sense of taste is closely related to food bolus formation and tastant dissolution by the combined action of saliva and mastication. Gustatory signals arise from tastant-mediated chemical stimulation of taste buds and are transduced by G-protein coupled receptors and ion channels constituting the molecular basis for basic tastes (ie sweet, bitter, salty, sour, umami and fatty acid taste). 6 Taste signals are then conveyed by the chorda tympani (CT), a branch of the facial nerve, the glossopharyngeal nerve (IX) and the vagus nerve (X) to the central nervous system. Taste, retronasal olfaction and oropharyngeal somatosensory modalities contribute to food flavour perception. Chemosensory impairments are frequently associated with reduced pleasure from eating 7 and can also cause unhealthy eating habits and unbalanced nutritional status. 8 Besides taste, oral somatosensory sensations related to food and oral conditions are generated during eating through Aβ, Aδ and C mechanosensory, chemosensory, thermosensory, proprioceptive and nociceptive trigeminal afferents innervating the mouth, oro-facial Abstract Food perception is a multimodal sensation which implies cross-modal interplays. Tactile, thermal, painful and kinaesthetic stimuli arising from food intake may impact on flavour perception, especially taste perception. The influence of oral somatosensory signals on food taste perception remains unclear. The aim of the present systematic review was to appraise the effects of oral mechanical, thermal, chemical and pain sensations on taste perception. In accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement, a search of the literature from 1968 to 2018 was conducted using MEDLINE via PubMed, EMBASE and clinical trials (PROSPERO registration reference: CRD42018100176). A total of 105 articles were included for analysis. The results from this review suggest that taste abilities and taste perception are frequently modified by food textural and chemical properties. Furthermore, saliva features, dental and prosthetic status and oral pain can also modulate taste perception. Biological and physiological phenomena underlying these results may be ...

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