Nutrition Support

Proposal

Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) has now become an integral part in the treatment of hematological malignancy. However, the conditioning regimen including intensive chemotherapy and total body irradiation causes severe mucositis, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, which results in the insufficient oral intake. Hence, parenteral nutrition is frequently required to keep the caloric intake. In these situations, the professional intervention by nutritional support team (NST) is indispensable. However, the management strategy of nutritional support in the field of HSCT has not been well established due to the scarcity of clinical trials. Our HSCT team at National Cancer Center Hospital in Japan has conducted several retrospective and prospective studies, and has published the results. We believe that these interventions by NST are quite promising to improve the clinical outcomes after HSCT, especially reducing the morbidity such as infectious diseases. As a next step, the beneficial effects should be clarified with international large-scale prospective clinical trials. To conduct the international clinical trials, we would like to know the current standard of nutritional support as well as other frequently applied maneuvers for the prophylaxis and treatment of infectious diseases and graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). Additionally, we would like to know what kinds of nutritional support our colleagues are interested in. To address these critical questions, we have made the following questionnaire.