New Screen Process for Oral Cancers

Patients with early-stage oral cancer may benefit from an advanced screening process allowing for a more accurate diagnosis, according to a U.S. study.

By combining conventional techniques with more modern techniques, we were able to better diagnose and determine the best options for patients with oral cancer, said lead author J.B. Epstein of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

This approach to diagnosing oral cancer may lead to easier identification of serious pathology, significantly lessening the need for unnecessary biopsies without additional risk of false negatives.

Doctors in this study used chemiluminescent light, a pharmaceutical grade dye used in addition to the conventional visual and manual observations of the patient.

This study found that of the 84 patients studied, the dye improved either the brightness or sharpness of the identified lesions by 61 percent. Only biopsying lesions that retained the toluidine blue stain reduced the false-positive rate by nearly 59 percent while maintaining zero false negatives.

The findings were presented at the Multidisciplinary Head and Neck Cancer Symposium in Rancho Mirage, Calif.