Oral Cancer is not a rare disease. Approximately 37,000 people will be diagnosed with oral cancer every year in the U.S. It kills one person every four hours of every day and over 100 new individuals will be diagnosed with it each day. The good news is that it can often be found early in its development, through a simple, painless, and quick screening.
Who should get screened?
Every adult. Oral cancer can often be caught early, even as a pre-cancer. With early detection, survival rates are high and the side effects from treatment are at their lowest. Like other screenings you engage in such as cervical, skin, prostate, colon, and breast examinations, oral cancer screenings are an effective means of finding cancer at its early, highly curable stages. Make them part of your annual health check-ups.
What are the risk factors?
One is through the use of tobacco and alcohol, a long term historic problem and cause, and the other is through exposure to the HPV16 virus (human papilloma virus version 16), a newly identified etiology, and the same one, which is responsible for the vast majority of cervical cancers in women. The quickest growing segment of the oral cancer population are young, healthy, non-smokers due to the connection to this virus.
Early Indicators:
(1) Red and or white discolorations of the soft tissues of the mouth. (2) Any sore that does not heal in 14 days. (3) Hoarseness which lasts for a prolonged period of time.
Advanced Indicators:
(1) A sensation that something is stuck in your throat. (2) Numbness in the oral region. (3) Difficulty in moving the jaw or tongue. (4) Difficulty in swallowing. (5) Ear pain occuring on one side only. (6) A sore under a denture, which even after adjustment of the denture, still does not heal. (7) A lump or thickening which develops in the mouth or on the neck.
An oral cancer screening should be conducted every year.
Our oral cancer exam includes a visual and tactile exploration of the interior of your mouth as well as the underside of your chin and neck. We also offer a relatively new fluorescent technology known as Velscope. Velscope is an adjunctive screening tool that enables your doctor to potentially detect cancerous and pre-cancerous lesions in its earliest stages.
For additional information about oral cancer, we would like to invite you to log onto The Oral Cancer Foundation's official website at www.oralcancer.org