• 7/6/2006
  • Flint, MI
  • Leslie LoBue
  • about12.com

One person dies of oral cancer every hour. But that wouldn’t be the case if more people caught the cancer early.

Right now, half of the people diagnosed with oral cancer die- with early detection it is 90-percent survivable.

His speech is impaired and some of his neck is gone. He can’t swallow without water. All because no one noticed a lesion in Brian Hill’s mouth until it was late stage cancer.

“I ate healthy. I never smoked a day in my life. I’m going, ‘How could this be happening to me?'”

It may not have happened if the discovery made in a UCLA lab had come six years earlier. As it turns out, your saliva contains better bio markers than blood for detecting oral cancer.

“We don’t have to stick a needle into someone’s vein or give someone a cup and have them go to the bathroom, which could be embarrassing. And it’s non-painful,” said Dr. David Wong, DMD.

The test is simple. You spit into a tube that’s taken to the lab and tested for bio markers that signal cancer. It’s similar to the PSA test for prostate cancer, but it’s nearly 20 percent more accurate.

“Within 24 hours, it will be known if Mrs. Jones, you are at risk for oral cancer in your mouth, or you have a clean bill of health,” Wong said.

If found early, treatment can be as simple as removing a precancerous lesion with a laser.

“In all cancers, I don’t care which you pick, where we’ve seen a drop in the death rate, it hasn’t been through some miracle drug. It’s always been early detection,” Hill said.

While Brian is now cancer-free, he and his wife Ingrid know the pain of catching this disease too late. They hope the test will save others from the same fate.

The saliva test is about 82 percent accurate at detecting oral cancer. Wong says it should be available through your doctor or dentist within about two years so.

He thinks it may eventually be used to screen for breast and pancreatic cancer and also Alzheimer’s disease.