Oral Mucositis in Patients Undergoing Antineoplastic Chemotherapy

Several grading systems for oral mucositis are available including those of the World Health
Organization (WHO), Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG), Western Consortium for Cancer
Nursing Research WCCNR, and the National Cancer Institute Common Toxicity Criteria (NCICTC)
and others However, all of these oral mucositis grading systems rely on visual examination
and are therefore subjective and operator-dependent tools and suffer from significant
interpersonal variability (6). With the current improvements in medicine and technology,
there is definitely a need for a more objective, easy to perform, non-invasive, affordable,
quantitative and reproducible tool that is operator-independent to assess the severity of
oral mucositis. The introduction of such a tool would greatly improve our ability to compare
the oral mucosal toxicity of antineoplastic therapies and the efficacy of various
mucoprotective therapies. Furthermore, the use of such a tool can be extended to patients
undergoing radiation treatment with or without chemotherapy for various malignancies
including head and neck cancers.