Effect of Antral Motility on Food Hydrolysis and Gastric Emptying from the Stomach: Insights from Computational Models

TL;DR

This study uses computational models to analyze how antral motility influences food hydrolysis and gastric emptying, providing detailed insights into stomach digestion mechanics.

Contribution

It introduces a human-stomach computational model based on imaging data to simulate digestion and assess motility effects on food breakdown and emptying.

Findings

Motility significantly affects the rate of food hydrolysis.

Reduced peristaltic amplitude decreases gastric emptying rate.

Stomach mixing correlates with antral contraction patterns.

Abstract

The peristaltic motion of the stomach walls combines with the secretion of enzymes to initiate the process that breaks down food. Computational modelling of this phenomenon can help reveal the details that would be hard to capture via in-vivo or in-vitro means. In this study, the digestion of a liquid meal containing protein is simulated in a human-stomach model based on imaging data. Pepsin, the gastric enzyme for protein hydrolysis, is secreted from the proximal region of the stomach walls and allowed to react with the contents of the stomach. The jet velocities, the emptying rate, and the extent of hydrolysis are quantified for a control case, and also for three other cases of reduced motility with varying peristaltic amplitudes. The findings quantify the effect of motility on the rate of food breakdown and emptying, and correlate the observations with the mixing in the stomach induced by the antral contraction waves.