Difficulty Eating
Partial or total loss of use of facial muscles may cause difficulty when chewing or swallowing. Facial muscles like the temporalis, masseter, medial pterygoid, and lateral pterygoid are responsible for chewing and grinding food into easily digestible sizes. However, when there’s a loss of control, it makes it difficult to chew and may led to slow and prolonged eating time. Failure to chew food into bits will make it difficult to swallow as the digestive system requires particles to be well-dissolved before reaching the stomach. [9]
Difficulty eating may increase the risk of other conditions like when food particles get trapped in the airways, leading to respiratory diseases. Medical experts advise most CP patients that suffer this symptom to use a feeding tube.