# Urea cream

Source: https://onco.cc/drugs/urea-cream/  
OnCo record `urea-cream` (Treatment). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Urea cream softens thick, dry skin. Rubbed on the hands and feet from the first day of sorafenib, a 10 per cent cream made the painful hand-foot skin reaction less common in a large trial.

## Summary

A DailyMed listing for a 40% urea cream describes use for debridement of hyperkeratotic lesions and for hyperkeratotic conditions such as dry rough skin, eczema, keratoderma, corns and calluses; that listing carries no FDA application number. In a randomised open-label trial in 871 people with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma starting sorafenib (Ren et al., J Clin Oncol 2015), 10% urea-based cream three times a day from day 1 with best supportive care lowered the 12-week incidence of any-grade hand-foot skin reaction compared with best supportive care alone (56.0% vs 73.6%; odds ratio 0.457, 95% CI 0.344 to 0.608); the authors called for blinded placebo-controlled trials.

## Fields

- Kind: Treatment
- Status: established
- Last checked: 2026-11-11
- Also known as: urea-based cream; 10% urea cream
- Tags: supportive; generic; supportive-care-gaps-2026-11
- Modality: Topical keratolytic emollient
- Mechanism: Urea softens and moisturises thickened skin and helps shed hard surface layers.

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea
- US label (DailyMed): urea cream 40% (listing): https://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/drugInfo.cfm?setid=0920f780-b504-1fea-e063-6394a90ae5a9
- Ren et al., Randomized controlled trial of the prophylactic effect of urea-based cream on sorafenib-associated hand-foot skin reactions in advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (J Clin Oncol 2015): https://doi.org/10.1200/JCO.2013.52.9651

## Connected records

- drugs: [Sorafenib](https://onco.cc/drugs/sorafenib/)
- terms: [Hand-foot syndrome and hand-foot skin reaction](https://onco.cc/terms/hand-foot-syndrome/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/urea-cream.json