Assessment of nutritional status in patients suffering from oral cancer after removable prosthetic restorations.
Dr n. med. Beata Sawczuk, Prof. Teresa Sierpińska
Medical University of Bialystok
Objectives
Head and neck cancers and their surgical treatment may lead to considerable deformations of the prosthetic field, chewing function impairment and aesthetics disorder. The effect of this condition is manifested by patients’ malnutrition affecting a lower tolerance of oncological therapy side effects, a prolonged recovery time and bad prognostication.
The study was aimed at assessing nutritional status in patients operated on due to head and neck cancers after the use of removable prosthetic restorations
Materials and Methods
Material: 25 oncological patients operated on due to the neoplasm and 25 healthy edentulous patients as a control group. Removable acrylic dentures were prepared for the patients.
Method: A nutritional history and its calculations in Dieta 6.0 programme prior to the prosthetic treatment and 6 weeks, 3, 6 and 12 months after the withdrawal of dentures.
Findings were applied to statistical analysis. Fridman, Wilcoxon and Mann-Whitney tests, and Spearman correlation, were used to analyse the results. Significance level of p≤0,05 was adopted.
Results
The study revealed that oncological patients ate meals of greater calorific value compared to patients from the control arm. They contained more protein with the predominance of animal protein as well as lipids and carbohydrates. Also, it was observed that after 6 weeks of using removable prostheses calorific values of the meals and nutritional values were considerably smaller in both groups. This may suggest that patients’ adaptation to new prosthetic restorations was hampered.
Conclusions
Based on this study, we have demonstrated that removable prosthetic restorations considerably improved the patients’ nutritional status. A change in nutritional preferences and a wide range of products selected have been observed