Vol.98 No.7 contentsPRACTICA OTO-RHINO-LARYNGOLOGICA
Vol. 98 No. 7 July 2005
Nizatidine Endances Salivary Secretion
in Human Dry Mouth
Masanori Umemoto, Atsushi Negoro, Tomomi Nin,
Kyoko Kushida and Masafumi Sakagami
(Hyogo College of Medicine)
There is no effective therapy for dry mouth although the number of patients with this condition have been increasing in recent years. Nizatidine, a histamine H2 receptor antagonist, has been reported to inhibit acetylcholine esterase, with a resulting increase in acetylcholine, in the cholinergic system. Therefore, this study was designed to evaluate whether nizatidine enhances salivary secretion in dry mouth patients.
Both the basal and stimulated salivary secretions were measured before and after the administration of nizatidine (300 mg/day) for 28 days in 18 healthy adult volunteers, 17 men and 1 woman (mean age: 39.7), and 19 patients with dry mouth, 3 men and 16 women (mean age: 66.4), who visited our clinic. The gustatory function was evaluated by the electric taste test and filter paper disk methods.
Both the basal and stimulated salivary secretions significantly increased in both the control and dry mouth patient groups compared to the pretreatment baseline with significant differences in statistics, using the Wilcoxon test after administration of nizatidine for 28 days. In addition, 16/19 (84.2％) of dry mouth patients reported subjective improvements of oral dryness. But neither the electric taste test nor the filter paper disk test showed any evidence of significant improvement in the gustatory function. These findings suggest that nizatidine increased salivary secretion and is useful for the treatment of patients with dry mouth.
Key words : nizatidine, salivary secretion, dry mouth