Eating During Treatment Maintains Swallowing in Head and Neck Cancers

Swallowing quality of life can be crucial for patients with human papillomavirus (HPV)-related oropharyngeal cancer, an expert told CURE®.

Oropharyngeal cancer is a type of cancer that originates in the oropharynx, a part of the throat behind the mouth opening, as defined by the National Cancer Institute.

Treatment with radiation or transoral robotic surgery showed similar survival outcomes, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. However, difficulty swallowing was a side effect experienced by patients from both treatment groups.

Patients who underwent radiation experienced more dry mouth, whereas patients who received surgery had difficulty chewing or opening their mouths, explained Dr. David Palma during an interview with CURE®.

Palma is a radiation oncologist and professor at Western University in Canada.

He sat down with CURE® to discuss the importance of eating during treatment to help maintain muscle function.

Transcript:

This comes back to my point about going to a high-volume center of expertise because they often have resources that can help with that. For example, at our center and many centers, they have swallowing experts called speech-language pathologists who see the patient during treatment and give them exercises.

Swallowing exercises [are] kind of like a personal training workout, where you're doing different exercises with your tongue and your neck. And also, we have dietitians who see their radiation patients every week during the treatment to see how they're doing [and] give them strategies for eating and swallowing.

We know that the more that you eat during treatment, the better you will be able to swallow down the road, because if you don't use your swallowing muscles, you lose the coordination, you lose the muscle strength, and it's harder to come back. So the more we can encourage people to eat [the better].

So, patients listening to this, who are thinking of having this treatment, try to get in touch with a dietician and a speech-language pathologist. They probably have those at the center that's treating you.

Transcript was edited for clarity and conciseness.

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