Supportive Care for Patients with Head and Neck Cancer during Radiotherapy

Abstract

Supportive care plays an important role in cancer therapy. Good supportive care helps to control toxicity, maintain or improve quality of life and lenghten overall survival. Supportive care includes anagotherapy, therapy of nauzea, vomitus diarhoea, infec­ tious complications, therapy of hematotoxicity, dyspnoea, fatigue and in radiotherapy of haed and neck cancers also therapy of skin toxicity and oral mucositis. Nutritional care is very important part of supportive care, because malnutrition is an independent prognostic and predictive factor. The artice concludes recomendation not only of two working groups of Czech oncology soci­ ety – for supportive care in oncology and for nutritional care in oncology.