156 Chapter 7 Unfortunately, the duration of the dry-mouth complaints was not available. In this light, it cannot be excluded that, for example patients who suffered for a relative long period from dry mouth, used different types of interventions than patients with more recent complaints. Besides, the included patients were allocated to the various dry-mouth patient groups based on their self-reported answers to the European Medical Risk-Related History questionnaire [14, 14]. Despite the high validity (sensitivity of 88–92% and specificity of 98–99%) of the European Medical Risk-Related History questionnaire [38, 39], this questionnaire does not provide information about the criteria that have been used for the diagnosis Sjögren’s syndrome nor information about the cumulative dose of radiotherapy received. Obtaining this information from the attending physician in future studies might improve the allocation of patients to different subgroups and thereby improve the validity of the data for each group of patients. MAIN CONCLUSIONS Various dry-mouth patients used a wide range of interventions to relieve their oral dryness. The use of these dry-mouth interventions was significantly associated with the overall (total XI score) and intra-oral (RODI scores) drymouth feeling. The use of interventions aimed to relieve dryness of the entire mouth, such as “drinking water” and “rinsing of the mouth”, was significantly associated with total XI score, while locally applied interventions, for example “using mouth gel”, were significantly associated with dryness of anterior tongue in particular. These findings might help clinicians to give more specific and patienttailored advice about interventions for the relief of oral dryness complaints.
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