MISSION STATMENT
The mission of the Nasal Physiology and Therapeutic Center is to study the interplay between nasal airflow, nasal obstruction, loss of smell and nasal sinus disease. Since the main physiological function of the nose is the passage of airflow, conditioning that airflow and sensing the odor within the flow (smell), it is important to understand one major question – how does the nose recognize and meet these functions? By exploring the answer to this question, our aim is to better understand what causes nasal obstruction, leading to a better understanding of the nature of nasal sinus disease and ultimately optimizing treatments or surgical options for nasal sinus disease.
RECENT LAB NEWS
Congratulations to Dr. Jennifer Malik for accepting her new position at Battelle
Congratulations to Dr. Jennifer Malik for accepting her new position at Battelle. Dr. Malik has been a post-doctoral researcher with Dr. Zhao's team and has been responsible for leading numerous projects, which has lead to several publications during her time with the lab. We wish her the best of luck with her new position at Battelle.
2021 AChemS Meeting
Congratulations to Kanghyun Kim and Dr. Zhenxing Wu for their abstract oral presentation acceptance at 2021 AChemS. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the AChemS meeting will be held virtually, and the oral presentations will be available as VODs on the conference page.
RELIEVE NASAL OBSTRUCTION SYMPTOMS THROUGH MODULATION OF AIRFLOW VIA A NOVEL NASAL AID
Kanghyun Kim, Zhenxing Wu, Alexander A. Farag, Bradley A. Otto, Kai Zhao. The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
A POROUS MEDIUM MODEL OF FILIFORM PAPILLAE STRUCTURE AND DEFORMATION TO PREDICT ORAL MECHANOSENSITIVITY TO VISCOUS SOLUTIONS
Zhenxing Wu1, Brittany L. Miles2, Kelly S. Kennedy3, Christopher T. Simons2, Kai Zhao1. 1Department of Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA 2Department of Food Science & Technology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA 3Division of Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery and Dental Anesthesiology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
For more information on the meeting, please see link
2021 COSM - ARS Meeting
Congratulations to Kanghyun Kim for his abstract poster presentation acceptance at 2021 COSM - ARS. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ARS meeting will be held virtually, and the poster and oral presentations will be available as VODs on the conference page.
3D PRINTING AS A PLANNING TOOL TO OPTIMIZE POST-SURGICAL SINONASAL SINUS IRRIGATION
Kanghyun Kim, Bradley A. Otto, Alexander A. Farag, Kai Zhao. The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
For more information on the meeting, please see link
https://www.american-rhinologic.org/2021-cosm-virtual-meeting
Using candy to sniff out probable cases of COVID-19
Scientists have proposed that using a cheap and simple product – hard candy – to screen for the loss of taste and smell in populations at risk for COVID-19 exposure may help detect probable positive cases in otherwise asymptomatic people.
The Ohio State University research team received $305,000 in National Institutes of Health funding in a competitive bid to develop easy-to-deploy strategies that can identify people who are potentially infected with SARS-CoV-2.
While symptoms like fever, chills, a cough and body aches vary widely among COVID-19 patients, an estimated 86% of people who test positive report a loss of smell, “which makes it a much better predictor, especially if it’s sudden loss,” said project co-leader Christopher Simons, associate professor of food science and technology at Ohio State.
Eight flavors of hard candies that are uniform in color will be manufactured for the test of the method’s effectiveness. Asking people to identify flavors by smelling and tasting the candies allows for sophisticated assessment of the function of two routes – via the nose and the back of the throat – by which our sense of smell helps tell us what we’re eating, Simons said.
Plus, the sweet treat is hard to resist as a scientific screening tool.
“Who doesn’t like candy? It’s an ideal stimulus because for this to work, people have to want to do it,” he said.
Simons’ lab in the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences focuses on understanding the neural and physiological underpinnings of how we perceive food. The research team also includes taste biologist Susan Travers, professor of biosciences in the College of Dentistry, and Kai Zhao, associate professor of otolaryngology in the College of Medicine, who specializes in olfaction – the sense of smell. The new funding is a competitive revision to one of Travers’ existing NIH grants.
For more information, please see link
https://news.osu.edu/using-candy-to-sniff-out-probable-cases-of-covid-19/
What happens when food first touches your tongue
A new study might explain why humans register some tastes more quickly than others, potentially due to each flavor’s molecular size.
The research, published last month in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, also provided explanation as to why humans register taste more quickly when food or drink moves over their tongues quickly, as compared to when they are held in their mouth steadily.
The findings indicate that both the speed with which food and drink move in our mouth and the size of the molecules in the food that we consume affect our ability to taste.
“Our tongue has papillae on it that act like a sea of kelp in an ocean,” said Kai Zhao, lead author of the paper and an associate professor of otolaryngology at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. “Those papillae – the small bumps that contain taste buds on the human tongue – move and sway as food or drink flow past them.”
Zhenxing Wu, a postdoctoral scholar in otolaryngology at Ohio State, co-authored this paper.
For more information, please see link
https://news.osu.edu/what-happens-when-food-first-touches-your-tongue/