“…Consequently, the identification of factors predicting the requirement of artificial nutrition would be helpful to avoid unnecessary risks for the patients. In a number of previous studies, clinical characteristics, such as male gender [20][21][22][23][24], advanced age [17,20,22,23,[25][26][27], poor ECOG Score [4,13,28,29], low BMI [17,22], nicotine abuse [30], high TNM stage [3,4,17,20,22,25], tumor localization in the nasopharynx [20,31], and tracheotomy [32] as well as treatment characteristics like concurrent chemotherapy [3,21,[33][34][35], accelerated fractioning of radiation therapy [36] have been identified to be associated with an higher risk of swallowing problems. More recently, dose volume parameters derived from several normal tissue structures in the head and neck region were evaluated for their potential to predict acute and late radiation induced swallowing problems.…”