What causes mouth sores?
This condition can affect as many as 80% of patients undergoing chemotherapy, radiation, or blood stem cell transplants. High-dose chemotherapy kills not only cancer cells, as it’s meant to, but other fast-growing cells as well, such as those lining the inside of the mouth and throat. That can leave patients with extremely painful open sores in those areas, which prevent them from eating, drinking, or talking for a week or more after such treatments. The mouth and throat sores are also an open avenue for serious infection, which can be life threatening to patients whose immune systems may still be recovering from the effects of chemotherapy, and the pain from the sores can be so intense that it requires the use of narcotic pain killers.
