Honey protects against mucositis

Oropharyngeal mucositis is one of the complications of radio- and chemoradiotherapy in ENT tumors. Researchers have now found that honey apparently helps to prevent mucositis.

Honey is known to affect wound healing. Therefore, Korean scientists have looked in a meta-analysis, whether honey can also be used to prevent prophylaxis in patients with head and neck cancer. They found that in the nine studies studied, patients with honey therapy developed significantly less frequently moderate to severe mucositis than control groups that received placebo or no therapy. However, only the subjects with radiotherapy seemed to benefit significantly from honey prophylaxis.

This was not the case with chemoradiotherapy. In addition, a significant loss of weight loss was observed in the "honey groups". An oral honey therapy before or after radiotherapy seems to be able to mitigate the negative effects of therapy on the oral and pharyngeal mucosa. The study can be found here. (Pm)