ISSN: 0973-7510

E-ISSN: 2581-690X

Research Article | Open Access
Pratima Putta , Kannan Natarajan, Swapna Sridevi Beeraka, Rakesh Kumar Manne and Prathi Venkata Sarath
Department of Oral Medicine and Radiology, Narayana Dental College, Nellore, Andhra Pradesh, India.
J Pure Appl Microbiol. 2021;15(3):1180-1186 | Article Number: 6965
https://doi.org/10.22207/JPAM.15.3.07 | © The Author(s). 2021
Received: 02/04/2021 | Accepted: 31/05/2021 | Published: 23/06/2021
Abstract

Oral cancer is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality globally.  There is a lack of studies on the growth of different Candida species in swab pre and post-radiotherapy. Hence, this study aimed to determine different Candida species in the oral cavity of patients who undergo radiotherapy. The study included 50 patients with oral cancer scheduled to undergo radiotherapy. Both saliva and swab samples were collected from all the patients before and after two- and six weeks of starting the radiotherapy. Similar inoculation was performed using the salivary swabs and incubated aerobically at 37°C for 48h. After 48h, culture plates were removed from the incubator and observed for the growth of different fungal species based on the color of the colonies. The culture of samples from patients with oral cancer resulted in the growth of 68% of Candida species in saliva and 44% in swab before initiating radiation. Unlike baseline findings, Candida albicans were identified in a higher number in swab samples (44%) than saliva (24%) post two weeks of radiotherapy. All saliva samples were positive to candida species, in which Candida albicans shows high prevalence (24%). After six weeks of radiotherapy, in the swab, 30% of samples were positive for Candida albicans, and 18% of samples were positive for non-albicans species. Before radiotherapy, at two weeks and six weeks of radiotherapy, saliva samples showed a higher prevalence of Candidal species compared to swab samples. The combination of other Candida species was also higher in saliva samples compared to swab samples during radiotherapy.

Keywords

Candida albicans, oral cancer, saliva, swab, radiotherapy

Article Metrics

Article View: 620

Share This Article

© The Author(s) 2021. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.