In India, doctors are reporting a rise in pre-cancerous lesions in the mouth – which they’re convinced are caused by chewing tobacco. Mouth cancer has a ten-year incubation period, so they fear a huge bout of oral cancer will hit India in a few years time. Mouth cancer is largely a lifestyle disease, meaning that the majority of the cases are related to tobacco and alcohol use. Approximately 90% of people with mouth cancer are tobacco users. Although smokeless tobacco products are less lethal, they are not a safe alternative to smoking. In addition to being a strong factor in the development of lung cancer, cigarette smoking also increases the risk of a number of other cancers, including mouth and throat cancers, bladder, pancreatic, cervical and kidney cancer.
[AdsWithin]
Possible signs and symptoms
One of the real dangers of this cancer is that in its early stages, it can be painless, and little in the way of physical changes may be obvious. Oral cancer may present itself with many symptoms; some of the common ones are listed below.
• Red (Erythroplakia) and white (Leukoplakia) patches on your lips or in your mouth
• Non-healing sore on your lip or in your mouth
• Swellings or lumps on the lips, gums, cheek, back of the throat etc.
• Bleeding in the mouth
• Numbness, loss of pain in any area of the mouth, neck or face
• Difficulty in moving the jaw or tongue
• Difficulty in chewing, swallowing or speaking
• Loosening of teeth
• A change in the fit of denture
• Ear pain
• Swollen lymph nodes in the neck
• Unexplained weight loss
People, who stop using tobacco, even after many years of use, can greatly reduce their risk of all smoking related illnesses, including mouth cancer. The best way to avoid these cancers is to never start smoking or chewing tobacco in any form.
Hurdles in diagnosis
Prevention is certainly much better than cure in this disease since, historically the death rate associated with oral cancer is particularly high not because it is hard to discover or diagnose, but due to the cancer being routinely discovered late in its development. Often oral cancer is only discovered when the cancer has metastasized to another location, most likely the lymph nodes of the neck. Prognosis at this stage of discovery is significantly worse than when it is caught in a localized intra oral area. Besides the metastasis, at these later stages, the primary tumour has had time to invade deep into local structures. Oral cancer is particularly dangerous because in its early stages it may not be noticed by the patient, as it can frequently prosper without producing pain or symptoms they might readily recognize, and because it has a high risk of producing second, primary tumours. This means that patients, who survive a first encounter with the disease, have up to a 20 times higher risk of developing a second cancer. This heightened risk factor can last for 5 to 10 years after the first occurrence.
