Revisiting Oral Cancer Screening

Cancer screening is a familiar concept to most of us yet like most things in medicine, it is good to revisit the topic for a concept check periodically.

Screening to me was the examination of apparently healthy individuals to identify those who had the disease.  However, after reading a paper titled  Screening for oral cancer - a perspective from the Global oral cancer forum  Speight, P. M., Epstein, J., Kujan, O., Lingen, M. W., Nagao, T., Ranganathan, K., & Vargas, P. (2017). I realized I was missing an important part of the concept and that is the need for the process to be conducted at regular predefined intervals and on the same population. Therefore, cross-sectional studies cannot claim to be about cancer screening.

In addition, on the current stand on oral cancer screening the paper highlights that the best method right now is the opportunistic screening of high-risk individuals. Although this presents its own problems since there is no guarantee the high- risk, individuals will visit the same dentists at required intervals?

The paper provides a detailed review of the subject and lists priority areas for further research

                                                                 

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