Mouth-rinses for the prevention of chemotherapy induced oral mucositis in children: a systematic review

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this review was to evaluate studies in basic oral care interventions to update evidence based practice guidelines for preventing oral mucositis (OM) in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. MATERIAL & METHODS: Pub Med database and Google Scholar were searched for all papers published between 2000 and December 2014 in English that were conducted using the search terms including ‘‘mocusitis, chemotherapy, mouth-rinses, oral care, oral care protocol, dental care,dental cleaning, oral decontamination, oral hygiene”, and the combined phrases in order to obtain all relevant studies. RESULTS: The initial search concluded 151 published papers representing both research and clinical work. Review articles, clinical case reports, literature reviews, and other nonresearch articles were excluded from the review. Following this process, 30 papers remained. CONCLUSION: Among these, chlorhexidine, normal saline, sodium bicarbonate, iseganan, benzydamine, sucralfate and Granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor have been used in the form of mouth-rinse for prevention of chemotherapy induced mucositis. However, none of these mouthrinses have been shown to be definitely effective in preventing chemotherapy induced oral mucositis.