Tackling Your Dental Treatment Plan

Treatment is usually meant to heal, but sometimes it causes other undesirable side effects in other parts of the body. For example, cancer patients usually experience oral health complications as a result of their treatments. Here are four forms of cancer treatment that may affect your oral cavity:

Radiotherapy

Also called radiation therapy, this is the use of high-energy rays to destroy cancer cells. Although the rays are usually targeted at damaged cells, there is always a chance that healthy tissues may be affected. The side effects occur when the radiation hits these healthy tissues.

Oral side effects associated with radiation therapy include dry mouth, gum sores, teeth decay and loss of taste. The risk of experiencing these (and other side effects) increases if you had other oral issues before the treatment. Therefore, it is a good idea to consult your dentist before going for radiation therapy. The dentist will examine you for things like infected teeth, gum disease and ill-fitting dentures, and hopefully help you manage them before going for cancer treatment.

Bone-Modifying Drugs

Treating some forms of cancer involve the administration of medications that induce bone loss. A good example is aromatase inhibitors used to treat women suffering from estrogen-sensitive breast cancer. Since a weakened bone is a health condition of its own, it has to be counteracted by administering bone modifying drugs. Unfortunately, these bone-modifying drugs also have their own side effects such as loose teeth, jawbone infection and swelling.

Chemotherapy

In this context, chemotherapy is the use of chemicals to destroy cancer cells. The chemicals may also attack your healthy tissues and induce side effects that include burning in the tongue, oral infections, mouth sores, and painful gums. The infection arises because chemotherapy lowers your immunity so that even a minor injury, such as a scratch from an orthodontic, can result in an oral infection.

Stem Cell Treatment

Stem cell treatment may cause oral complications in two main ways. First, chemotherapy usually precedes stem cell transplant, and its effects in the oral cavity have been described above. Secondly, there is a risk of developing graft-versus-host disease when you undergo stem cell transplant. This condition develops when the donor cells begin to attack your original tissues. Its symptoms include dry mouth, cavities, increased teeth sensitivity and oral sores.

From these four examples, it is clear that cancer treatment can take a huge toll on your oral health. This doesn't mean that you forgo these potentially problematic treatment methods. It just means that you have to work closely with your dentist (like those at the Claremont Dental Institute) to mitigate these oral complications.