Oral complications of palliative patients with advanced cancer

Abstract

Background:  Oral health care control is especially important in palliative care, Oral pain and adverse symptoms must be controlled during  palliative care, because adequate communication with patients makes easy to  perform good quality palliative care .  In this case preserving verbal communication and comfortable mouth is very important.

Aim: Our aim was to review the literature about the oral cavity complains of  patients with advanced cancer undergoing the palliative care, and to define which of the complains are caused by direct impact of oncological disease and which by the treatment methods.

Methods: we tried to review most of existing literature in this field. Unfortunately, there are only few amount of literature about mouth problems of palliative patients with advanced cancer, but we used them to overview all known oral problems. Some of them announce about oral infections, some of them talk about treatment methods impact and etc.. We summarized all of them to create a real picture of oral cavity of palliative patients.

Conclusion: Literature review proves that xerostomia, oral infections, taste alteration and other pathological conditions of oral cavity are very common in patients with advanced cancer. They lead to malnutrition and communication disorder and  with the accompanying pathological condition decrease the quality of life.