How common is it for patients to get mouth sores during a transplant?

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

A yeah, the reason why patients develop Amazon as our source. 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. 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 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 in some patients will develop some mild sores we do use cryotherapy to prevent oral mucositis, which is a common complication of stem cell transplant. Oral mucositis basically means mode source. And we do you patients ice to chew for about 45 minutes to an hour after the high dose.

And so that reduces the amount of melphalan in the mouth. And that is remarkably successful. 

To avoid, to prevent the absorption of the chemotherapy in the mouth, we make them chew ice, right.

A couple of hours before and during the infusion. So the ice, output the vasoconstriction and the there is less absorption.

And then sometimes, you know, because the immuno system is, is compromised by the chemotherapy, they can have the herpes, you know, source of their patty collision.

So we put everybody on acyclovir to prevent that. But that's the reason I think you know it comes with the territory, with the chemotherapy, but is very self-limited. It doesn't last a long time.

We do you know if they're really severe we put patients sometime in the hospital with pain 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 honest static, so they feel like some relief. Sometimes we use, the magic mouth, is called the magic mouth, solution, which is a with, you know, some steroids, some anesthetic and, time.

We do pain medications and, but, you know, I do a, I do a lot of transplant for myeloma, and, and, you know, it doesn't happen in to 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.