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Finding oral cancer - It’s all in how you look at it
A study by BC Cancer Agency researchers sheds new light on oral cancer. A hand-held blue light device, pioneered at the BC Cancer Agency, could change clinical practices. Researchers examined oral cancer patients for pre-cancerous and cancerous lesions that are not visible to the naked eye. The light device makes cancerous lesions that look like normal tissue under regular white light appear as dark patches.
“This light device could revolutionize surgical practice, allowing us to see previously hidden changes at the edge of cancers during surgery,” says Dr. Scott Durham, surgeon, Vancouver General Hospital.
The light device detected dark patches that extended beyond the tumour and its surgical boundary in 19 of the 20 patients involved in the study. Biopsies taken from the tissue outside the surgical boundary confirmed the existence of both cancerous and abnormal cells.
Recognizing the tissue surrounding oral cancers is at high-risk for developing cancer, surgeons generally remove an arbitrary width of 10 millimetre or more of normal-looking tissue surrounding the tumour, if anatomically possible. However, this study has shown that this approach still fails to completely remove the high-risk tissues in many patients.
“By using the light device, we were able to see that cancerous and pre-cancerous lesions are not evenly distributed around the tumour,” says Dr. Catherine Poh, Oral Pathology Specialist at the BC Cancer Agency and Principal Investigator of the study. “Current surgical practices sometimes do not eliminate oral cancers completely and this contributes to a high rate of recurrence.”
Oral cancer is a deadly disease with little change in the survival rate in more than three decades. The results of this study could potentially affect the management of the 3,100 new cases of oral cancer developing in Canada each year.
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