Oral Cancer is Discussed by Shelby Township Dentist
Hi I’m Dr. Heather Pranzarone Stratton at HPS Advanced Dental Care. We’re located in Shelby Township Michigan at 24 Mile. I wanted to talk a little bit today about oral cancer. Oral cancer is a disease that over the years, we haven’t found a lot of great success in treating. We know that 50% of people that are diagnosed with it are not usually still alive after 5 years so it’s a type of cancer that I feel in the dental profession, we probably could be doing a better job helping to diagnose people at a much earlier stage.
So, we take diagnosis of oral cancer very seriously. Actually in the last year, we’ve had three patients that have had some sort of head and neck cancer. All those patients, I’m happy to report are doing really well right now.
We go through a series of steps to make sure that oral cancer is screened for at every cleaning appointment and we do that as part of our exam. It’s incorporated in every exam that we do on every patient. We check and make sure the lymph nodes in your neck and in your head are feeling normal and healthy. We look inside your mouth very carefully to make sure there’s no signs of any growths or sores or redness or irritations or anything like that. If you at home notice that you’re feeling something in your neck, that maybe shouldn’t be there or if you look inside your mouth and you see maybe a red spot or a white spot that doesn’t look quite right, by all means call your dentist, give us a call, have us take a look at it.
We also take that one step further. We have a test that our office called VELscope. VELscope is a test that is basically very, very non-invasive. It’s a light that we use. A special wavelength of light that we use that we look inside your mouth with. This light is able to detect at a very, much earlier stage on a cellular level if there’s anything going on that’s maybe precancerous or cancerous in your mouth. So it’s a very important test that we like to use on all of our patients to help us catch oral cancer at a much earlier stage.
We have a type of software in the office that helps to help us determine what your oral cancer risk scores are. We ask you a series of questions. After we ask these questions, we are able to then put it into the software, and it helps to determine what your risk score is. So it’s anywhere from a 1 to a 5, 1 being low risk, 5 being high risk. Some of the things that put you at high risk for oral cancer are smoking and drinking alcohol, having a lot of alcohol consumption, past histories of cancer, past family history of cancer. So we, we ask these questions, we put them into the software and it develops a risk score for us. What we do in our office is we want to make sure that your treatment is specified just for you.
This risk score helps us to be able to determine how often you need this vel-scope or this specialized light screening tool to help us determine how often you need it. So if you’re at low risk, maybe every couple few years. Maybe if you’re at high risk, maybe every six months, but that way we’re able to really detail and give you the best risk score and develop how often you need to be screened for oral cancer.
Oral Cancer is Discussed by Shelby Township Dentist
If you have any other questions about oral cancer, please feel free to give us a call, 248-652-0024.
