Functional brain imaging of swallowing: An activation likelihood estimation meta‐analysis

Abstract

A quantitative, voxel-wise meta-analysis was performed to investigate the cortical control of water and saliva swallowing. Studies that were included in the meta-analysis (1) examined water swallowing, saliva swallowing, or both, and (2) reported brain activation as coordinates in standard space. Using these criteria, a systematic literature search identified seven studies that examined water swallowing and five studies of saliva swallowing. An activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis of these studies was performed with GingerALE. For water swallowing, clusters with high activation likelihood were found in the bilateral sensorimotor cortex, right inferior parietal lobule, and right anterior insula. For saliva swallowing, clusters with high activation likelihood were found in the left sensorimotor cortex, right motor cortex, and bilateral cingulate gyrus. A between-condition meta-analysis revealed clusters with higher activation likelihood for water than for saliva swallowing in the right inferior parietal lobule, right postcentral gyrus, and right anterior insula. Clusters with higher activation likelihood for saliva than for water swallowing were found in the bilateral supplementary motor area, bilateral anterior cingulate gyrus, and bilateral precentral gyrus. This meta-analysis emphasizes the distributed and partly overlapping cortical networks involved in the control of water and saliva swallowing. Water swallowing is associated with right inferior parietal activation, likely reflecting the sensory processing of intraoral water stimulation. Saliva swallowing more strongly involves premotor areas, which are crucial for the initiation and control of movements.

Is the mirror neuron system involved in imitation? A short review and meta-analysis

“…ALE is a quantitative method for estimating consistent activation across different imaging studies (Grosbras et al, 2005;Sö rö s et al, 2008;Chan et al, 2009). The ALE analysis was conducted using the standard settings in the Ginger ALE software .…”

Distributed processing; distributed functions?

“…Since its introduction, ALE has been applied to many aspects of normal brain function (Decety and Lamm, 2007; Costafreda et al, 2008; Spreng et al, 2009; Soros et al, 2009), as well as in studies of neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders, such as schizophrenia (Ragland et al, 2009; Minzenberg et al, 2009; Glahn et al, 2005), obsessive–compulsive disorder (Menzies et al, 2008), depression (Fitzgerald et al, 2008), and developmental stuttering (Brown et al, 2005). Recently, ALE has been extended to voxel-based morphometry (Schroeter et al, 2007; Glahn et al, 2008; Ellison-Wright et al, 2008) and diffusion tensor imaging studies (Ellison-Wright and Bullmore, 2009).…”

Central Nervous System Control of Voice and Swallowing

“…Functional brain imaging studies of swallowing in humans has shown a similar pattern of brain activation involving not only the lateral pericentral region similar to the swallowing cortical area in the macaque but also activation in the anterior insula, inferior parietal area and bilateral anterior cingulate (Soros, Inamoto and Martin, 2009). When spontaneous saliva swallowing, volitional saliva swallowing and water swallowing were contrasted using event-related fMRI, a similar pattern of brain activation was found for all three tasks involving the lateral precentral gyrus, lateral postcentral gyrus, and right insula.…”