Symptom distress and interference among cancer patients with osteoradionecrosis of jaw: A cross-sectional study.
Dongye Yang, Feng Zhou, Xinyu Fu and 4 others
PMID 31508447WHAT IT FOUND
Patients with osteoradionecrosis of the jaw after radiotherapy reported a heavy symptom burden: 97.9% had at least one symptom, and limited mouth opening was the worst.
Ask about mouth opening, swallowing, speech, hearing and distress.
Key findings
0197.9% of participants reported at least one symptom, and 85.2% reported symptom interference.
02Limited mouth opening was the most severe symptom, with 84.2% incidence and 48.4% of those affected reporting severe limitation.
03Longer time to onset of osteoradionecrosis after radiotherapy was significantly correlated with more serious symptom distress.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPsWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The study was single centre and small, with 95 analysed questionnaires, so it may not generalise to other hospitals or populations. The cross-sectional design measured symptoms at one time point, so it cannot show how symptoms change over time or prove that one symptom causes another. Patients with mental illness, drug dependency, recurrence, metastasis, severe infection, or serious co-morbidity were excluded, so the sample does not represent all patients with head and neck cancer. The instrument used a Chinese version with 17 added osteoradionecrosis items, so the osteoradionecrosis-specific symptom list may not be standard in other settings.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflict of interest. The study was funded by the Nurturing funds for nursing young talents of Sun Yat-sen University.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the correlations as proof that any treatment works. This was a cross-sectional symptom survey, not a trial of mouth opening training or any other intervention.