Changes seem to exist both in the primary gustatory sense as well as in food perception in paediatric cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Single solutions, such as efforts to serve "tasty food", do not suffice alone. A more effective solution may be to combine different strategies and combinations of oral, enteral and parenteral nutrition should be considered to prevent malnutrition.

Adequate nutrition is an important part of supportive therapy for the pediatric cancer patient. The aim of this study was to assess parents' perceptions of their child's eating pattern after onset of chemotherapy and the strategies they used to cope when eating problems arose. A semistructured interview was performed with parents of 11 consecutively admitted children. The results showed that parents have a realistic perception of their child's food intake and that they are able to recognize reasons for poor food intake that may be unknown to the staff. The individual responses of the parents and the mechanisms of coping were unique for each individual. The responsibility of getting the child to eat was distressing for many parents. The study indicates that parents need continuous support to serve an optimal role in the nutritional care of their child.

Lichen planus (LP) is a chronic mucocutaneous disease with unknown cause. Patients with LP often have both oral and genital lesions, but these conditions are often considered as separate diseases and treated accordingly. To find out which genes are differently expressed in mucosal LP compared to normal mucosa and establish whether oral and genital LP are in fact the same disease, whole genome expression analysis was performed on epithelium from 13 patients diagnosed with oral and/or genital LP and normal controls. For confirmation of keratin 4 and corneodesmosin expression, quantitative reverse-transcription PCR and immunohistochemistry were used. Many genes involved in epithelial development and differentiation are differently expressed in epithelium from LP compared to normal epithelium. Several of the differentially expressed genes are common for oral and genital LP and the same biological processes are altered which supports the fact that oral and genital LP are manifestations of the same disease. The change in gene expression indicates that differentiation is altered leading to changes in the epithelial barrier.

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