• Investigation the affective factors in treatment mucositis in neck and head cancer arising from radiotherapy (Systematic review)
  • fatemeh karimzadeh soureshjani,1 elham safari,2,* sheida jalali bajgiran,3
    1. student research committee , school of paramedical sciences , shahrekord university of medical sciences , shahrekord , iran
    2. student research committee , school of nursery and midwifery , mashhad islamic azad university , mashhad , iran
    3. student research committee , school of nursery and midwifery , mashhad islamic azad university , mashhad , iran


  • Introduction: Radiotherapy is a common treatment for head and neck tumors that is sometimes used alone and sometimes in combination with other therapies. This treatment not only destroys cancer cells but also damage normal cell. Mucositis is an early complication of radiotherapy that causes scarring of the mouth mucus and severe pain for the patient. Many methods have been tried to prevent and treat oral mucositis or reduce its symptoms but don’t find certain method, so the aim of this study to investigating the affective factors in treatment mucositis in neck and head cancer arising from radiotherapy.
  • Methods: This review was performed within articles published at PubMed, Google scholar, ISC and SID from 2000 to 2019. The keywords were mucositis, radiotherapy, neck and head cancer and treatment. By searching this database, 70 articles were found, 45 of them were not related with investigating and 14 of them by reading abstract were removed. All articles chosen from English and Persian articles.
  • Results: Finally 17 articles were included in the study, in one study that performed on patients which were treated with radiotherapy, the experimental group received curcumin and the control group took placebo for 6 weeks, the result was showed: the severity of mucositis in the experimental group was lower than control groups and also curcumin didn’t caused any oral complications. Also in another study that persons were treated with mouthwash contained propolis was showed that the prevalence of mucositis was lower than control groups. Also study have shown that ice therapy reduced the oral inflammation.
  • Conclusion: It seems that some Factors such as nutrition and using enough fluids, mouthwash, antifungal drugs and curcumin reduce the oral inflammation and also are natural compounds in comparison to chemical drugs have fewer complications but need to be more research done at this topic.
  • Keywords: Mucositis, Radiotherapy, Neck and head cancer, Treatment.