Introduction: Radiation Therapy as a cancer treatment method has special acute and late side effects specially alteration in skin tissue health that needs caring with different products which can have other side effects. Therefore natural products are considering decreasing side effects severity. Objective: This research is conducted to determine the effect of Aloevera cream on severity of radiotherapy induced dermatitis in cancer patients. Methods: The present research is a clinical trial study that is done on 120 cancer patients who were randomly classified in 2 groups of case (60 samples using topical Aloevera cream, 35% TID until 25th session of treatment) and control (with Routine care). Data collection instrument was a two – section questionnaire including 1) researcher – made section related to personal, disease and treatment characteristics and 2) modified RTOG index to assess the severity of skin reaction gathered by interview, observation and measurement of patients' weight and height. By using Chi-square, it was shown that both groups were matched in all variables. Data related to the second part of the tool was gathered by an observer in first and 25th session of radiotherapy. Data were analyzed by descriptive and deductive statistics by SPSS software version 14.
Results: The findings indicated that the severity of skin reaction in majority of case group (41.6 %) was grade 1 whereas in control group, most samples (33%) had skin severity of 1.5 degrees. Also Mean and SD of skin severity in case and control group were 0.98± 0.77 and 1.27± o.81 respectively. There was a significant difference shown by U Man Whitney test between skin reaction severity (p = 0.02) in two groups.
Conclusion: This research showed that topical Aloevera cream 35% has decreased radiotherapy induced skin reaction. Therefore in case of results confirmation by future studies, topical use of this cream may decrease pain and discomfort and promote patients' quality of life.
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