Taste acuity and food attitudes of selected patients with cancer.

Patients with cancer may display taste abnormalities. In this study, abnormalities observed before treatment involved decreased salt and sweet sensitivity. For some thresholds, greater abnormalities were observed among men and women, among patients with colon cancer than among those with breast cancer, and among those with a greater extent of disease. Observations of slight increases in thresholds for sour detection and bitter recognition during the early treatment period and normalization of high sweet recognition thresholds after two weeks of treatment suggest that additional changes in taste acuity may accompany short-term treatment with 5'fluorouracil. However, absence of a correlation of taste changes with changes in food preferences points to the role of other factors in determining patients' food preferences during such treatment. Consideration of the incidence of taste abnormalities in these groups of patients with cancer and observation of altered food attitudes among patients receiving 5-fluorouracil does provide a basis for general recommendations for serving foods which will appeal to these patients.