Could A Fruit Winder Help Improve Dental Medical Imaging?

It is rare for sugary snacks to be at all relevant to medical imaging, and even rarer for said sweets to be positively linked to dental health, but a study found that sweets could potentially lead to better mouth X-rays.

The study, published in the Journal of Medical Radiation Sciences, was focused on potential solutions to the issue of tongue placement, a common concern with dental X-rays that can often lead to multiple scans being taken unnecessarily.

Patients are typically told to hold their tongue against the roof of the mouth, but this position can be difficult to maintain.

The best solution, according to the study, was to take a piece of fruit leather and place it against the roof of the mouth.

Fruit leather, also known as Fruit Winders in the UK, Fruit Roll-ups in the United States,  and Fruit-by-the-Foot elsewhere, is a thin fruit-flavoured strip that has a lot of different guises but is known for being very thin, very sticky and having particularly strong flavours.

It was found that the fruit flavour helped keep the tongue in place better than chewing gum, medical tape or nothing at all, and the differences were particularly stark.

In three-quarters of the X-ray sessions where a dentist used a strip of fruit leather, there were no problems with taking medical images that were of a high enough quality on the first attempt. 

By contrast, when no adhesive aid was used at all, this figure drops from 75 per cent to just 36 per cent.

The consequences of this are significant. Not only does this save time and potentially money depending on if the patient used a private dentist, but it also exposes them to less radiation through the need for a second X-ray, as well as tasting delicious in the process.

It not only highlights the rather amusing fact that sweets can sometimes help protect teeth but also that a simple solution can be enough to improve imaging significantly.