Foul taste after radiotherapy

Good Morning Peter27263bf2

My name is Joanne and I’m one of the cancer information nurses here on the Macmillan Support Line.

Thank you for contacting us and welcome to our Online Community. I hope that you find it a useful source of support and advice. You may want to consider joining our Head and neck cancer forum where you can talk to other people who are at different stages of their treatment pathway.

I’m sorry to hear that you are experiencing ongoing issues with changes to your taste after your radiotherapy treatment. This can be a difficult side effect to deal with, and as you are experiencing, can impact your enjoyment of food and quality of life as well as causing weight loss.

Changes to how your taste food after this type of treatment are not uncommon. Radiotherapy affects the way in which taste buds can repair themselves so the ability to taste normally can change.

Radiotherapy may also cause damage to the salivary glands, which have an important role in how food tastes by producing saliva which mixes with food and stimulates the taste buds.

The time taken for these changes to resolve can vary from person to person and will depend on the area of your mouth that was treated, as well as the dose of radiotherapy that you had.

Many people will start to see some improvement around 2 to 3 months after completing their treatment but for others the process can take longer.

It’s important to continue with regular mouthcare and oral hygiene, incorporating regular mouth rinses. Your hospital team or pharmacist can recommend mouth rinses or gels which may help you keep your mouth as clean and moist as possible,

Avoiding foods and drinks from tins and cans and using wooden or plastic utensils can help reduce the metallic taste for some people. Chewing sugar free gum or lemon sweets through out the day can also help.

You may have to experiment with different types and textures of food to find things which are more enjoyable for you. As you can read on our forum, Taste after radiation can vary from person to person and you may find that a food that tastes unpleasant initially, can be more palatable a few weeks later as your taste buds and salivary glands recover.

Stronger flavours can be useful in overcoming some of the unpleasant taste you are experiencing – adding herbs, garlic and marinating foods in oils and juices before cooking can help. You may also find that foods which you previously didn’t like are now more palatable so do think about trying some of those as well.

You may also find that different temperatures of foods can impact the taste sensations you are experiencing. Lukewarm foods can sometimes be more palatable than extremes of hot or cold.

It can be useful to keep a Taste Diary (which you can find on page 5 of this patient information leaflet) so that you can monitor the effects specific foods have. This can also be useful when you are talking to your team about the impact your taste changes are having.

You might also find some useful tips from these Royal Surrey NHS foundation videos and Penny Brohn about managing taste changes and eating well when eating is a challenge.

I hope this information is useful and that you start to see some improvements soon. Please do keep in touch and let us know if there is anything else that we can help with.

 Regards

Joanne

Ref JH/HW