A national consortium of health care professionals, scientists and patient advocates was formed to address taste and smell problems in clinical trials. TASTY aims to determine whether patients with cancer suffering from taste and smell alterations benefit from taste steering and taste and smell training compared to standard care. Saliva analyses will provide insight into the development of taste and smell alterations.
In patients undergoing chemotherapy, taste alterations are observed in up to 85% of patients, and smell alterations in up to 60%.
These alterations lead to loss of appetite, reduced food enjoyment, and decreased quality of life, and can also result in a decreased dietary intake and impaired nutritional status of patients. This can affect cancer treatment, patient recovery, and survival. Taste and smell alterations present in various ways, including absence or increased sensitivity of taste and smell, and changes in taste perception. Some patients experience a continuous metallic taste. Such taste and smell alterations may also impact caregivers, who are often involved in food preparation for these patients.
Taste steering is a coping strategy to adapt meals to changes in taste and smell. Based on a taste and smell assessment, patients are provided with meals based on their specific flavour profile and tailored to their preferences. In this project we make use of an app to provide detailed personalized advice, in combination with consultation of an expert panel of chefs.
Taste and smell training is a method to ‘train’ the olfactory pathways through daily exposure to a standardized selection of tastes and odours. This ‘physiotherapy’ for nose and mouth has shown to be effective in a pilot study.
To gain more insight in the pathophysiology of taste and smell alterations, the relationship between salivary characteristics and objective and subjective measures of taste and smell and clinical parameters will be studied. This hypothesis-generating approach will also enable the longitudinal analysis of saliva composition and the association with the response to the interventions.
In this project, researchers from the UMCG collaborate with experts in the field from the Academic Center for Dentistry, Ikazia hospital, Wageningen University and others. Advisors from patient associations and professional associations are consulted on a regular basis. Patients are included in the clinical trials associated with the project in 12 different hospitals spread across the Netherlands. This project is funded by the Dutch Cancer Research Fund (KWF).
