BETA - How common is it for patients to get mouth sores during a transplant? Why do patients get mouth sores?

How common is it for patients to get mouth sores during a transplant? Why do patients get mouth sores? Yeah, the reason why patients develop mouth soreness, mouth sores during the transplant because the chemotherapy that we use to prepare patients to use to, you know, get rid of the myeloma. It's really a safe chemotherapy with two major toxicity. One is kills all the blood and so the bad and the good and so patients will need to be supported and that's the reason why they receive the stem cells rescue. The second one is GI toxicity because the cells, the layer covering our GI tract, your mouth, esophagus, intestine, they are highly proliferating so the chemotherapy targets those cells so they develop what we call the mucositis which is an inflammation of the mucosa, the layer in the GI tract so they have nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and some patient will develop mouth sores and then the chemotherapy in fact to avoid, to prevent the absorption of the chemotherapy in the mouth, we make them chew ice a couple of hours before and during the infusion so the ice help with the vasoconstriction and there is less absorption and so we don't see that very much and then sometimes, you know, a patient because the immune system is compromised by the chemotherapy, they can have herpes, you know, sores, their pathic lesion so we put everybody on a cyclovir to prevent that but that's the reason I think, you know, it's come with the territory with the chemotherapy but it's very self-limited. It doesn't last a long time. Is there a way to treat mouth sores? So we do, you know, if they're really severe we put patients sometime in the hospital, we pay medication but we also do a lot of topical, you can use, you know, some rinsing, we have some solution that we can give it to the patient to keep the mouth clean, the mouth rinsing and they have some anesthetic so they feel like some relief. Sometimes we use the magic mouth, it's called the magic mouth solution which is with, you know, some steroids, some anesthetic and sometimes we do pain medications and but, you know, I do a lot of transplant for myeloma and, you know, it doesn't happen into all patients and some patients are a little bit more prone but as I mentioned they don't last for a long period of time so pain control, topical solutions, yeah. We do use cryotherapy to prevent oral mucositis which is a common complication of stem cell transplant. Oral mucositis basically means mouth sores and we do give patients ice to chew for about 45 minutes to an hour after the high dose melphalan so that reduces the amount of melphalan in the mouth and that is remarkably successful.