Mouth sores, known as mucositis, result when the lining of the mouth is damaged from chemotherapy or radiation therapy. The mouth injury can range from a slight soreness to mouth ulcers, which can make eating and swallowing extremely painful.

"The more severe the mouth sores, the more drastic the consequence," said Marylin Dodd, RN, PhD, professor at the University of California at San Francisco School of Nursing. "It can interfere with the intake of food and fluids that can lead to malnutrition and dehydration, which could result in hospitalization. In some cases, when oral complications are so severe, cancer treatments have to be stopped. This may mean that the patient is unable to receive a full dose of the cancer treatment." Germs (bacteria or fungi) can penetrate through mouth sores to enter the bloodstream and spread to internal organs where they may cause life-threatening infection.

A study in a recent issue of Cancer reports on a new, easy-to-use, scoring system to help health care providers measure the severity of a patient?s mucositis. The scoring system was developed by a panel of experts, including dentists, nurses, physicians, and scientists, and was used at nine cancer centers with 108 chemotherapy patients and 56 radiation patients. Researchers believe it will aid in research into the problem of mouth sores.

"It is important that there is a good way to measure objectively the severity of mucositis," said Stephen Sonis, DMD, DMSc, lead author of the study and a professor at Harvard School of Dental Medicine. "There are many scoring systems that have been developed for many different reasons. However, there has been no universal standard to measure mucositis," he said.

Currently, there is no treatment that can completely prevent mouth sores, although patients can minimize the risk of infection by consulting a dentist prior to treatment and by taking certain precautions, Dr. Dodd said. "Pre-treatment dental visits and good oral care go a long way to lowering a patient?s risk for mucositis," she added.

Of the 1.2 million Americans diagnosed with cancer each year, approximately 400,000 will develop oral complications from their treatments. Mucositis occurs in almost all patients receiving head and neck radiation, in more than 75 percent of bone marrow transplant recipients, and in nearly 40 percent of patients receiving chemotherapy. "The good news is there is a huge amount of research to find out why mucositis happens and develop intervention methods," Dr. Sonis concluded. "There are several promising drugs currently in clinical trials as well."