Mouthwash, ice chips relieve oral chemotherapy sores

LONDON (Reuters) - An antiseptic mouthwash or ice chips can prevent painful mouth sores in cancer patients who are receiving chemotherapy, researchers said on Monday.

Up to 40 percent of patients given a common chemotherapy drug suffer from the painful sores known as oral mucositis, which can make eating and swallowing difficult.

But Danish scientists have discovered that mouthwash containing chlorhexidine reduced the frequency and the duration of mouth sores, and ice chips were even more effective.

"The results point toward a role for chlorhexidine in prevention of oral mucositis in adult patients with solid tumors treated with chemotherapy in conventional doses," Dr. Jens Benn Sorensen, of the National University Hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark, said in a statement.

He and his team compared the effectiveness of mouthwash, ice chips and a placebo in 225 patients being treated for gastrointestinal cancer. Thirteen percent of patients using the mouthwash developed painful mouth sores that impaired eating, compared with 11 percent of those given ice chips and 33 percent in the placebo group.

Sorensen, who presented the findings at the 31st Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Istanbul, Turkey, said it is the first study to evaluate chlorhexidine in a large group of cancer patients given a chemotherapy drug that is likely to cause mouth sores.

"Patients suffering from this complication have difficulty eating and swallowing. In the most severe form, they cannot eat or drink at all and must receive nutrition and fluid replacement through tubes into the stomach or intravenously," he said.