The pH profile of the human stomach (2009-present)

• Background and motivation.
• Published papers.
• Highlights of research
• Collaborators

Background and information

The development of a validated mathematical model for the change in pH in the human stomach following a meal will have implications for areas such as nutrition and drug therapy. For example, it may be important to know how the pH in the stomach changes following a meal, in order to maximise the efficiency and digestion of an oral drug that is activated at a certain stomach pH. Such a model may also be used to determine the effect that varying pH has on the rate of digestion in the stomach.

Bibliography

1. Yoo, M.J.Y., and Chen, X.D. (2009). Development of a new human in vitro physico chemical upper gastrointestinal system (IPUGS) - Motility methods. Submitted.

Incomplete mixing Published papers

In the following:

• a superscript ^p denotes an author who was a PhD student at the time the research was carried out.
• a superscript ^m denotes an author who was an undergraduate at the time the research was carried out.
• a superscript ^u denotes an author who was an undergraduate at the time the research was carried out.

Referred conference papers

1. R. van Bentump, M.I. Nelson, X.D. Chen and G. O'Brien. The pH profile of the human stomach. In Proceedings of the 38th Australasian Chemical Engineering Conference, CHEMECA 2010, (on CDROM), Engineers Australia, 2010. ISBN 978-085-825-9713.

Highlights of research

1. Developed a simple mode for pH change in in vitro experiments mimicking the change in the pH in the human stomach during and following a meal (Bentum et al, 2010). The model gave reasonable a fit to trends observed in experimental data (Yoo and Chen, 2009). However, the change in pH was underestimated as the model does not consider any acid-base chemistry.

Collaborators