6/3/2005 By Ed Edelson Forbes Nearly 40,000 lives could be saved worldwide every year through early detection of oral cancer. That's the conclusion of a new study in which health-care workers carefully examined the mouths of approximately 170,000 people in India for signs of malignancy. While the oral health of Indians differs greatly from that of Americans -- most notably because many Indians chew a cancer-causing substance called pan-tobacco -- the study results "apply to people all over the world, including those in the United States," said Dr. Rengaswamy Sankaranarayanan. Sankaranarayanan is head of screening for the French-based International Agency for Research on Cancer, and lead author of the study that appears in the June 3 issue of The Lancet. That assessment sounds reasonable, agreed Dr. Sol Silverman Jr., a professor of oral medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a spokesman for the American Dental Society. "The prevalence is higher in India than in the United States, but we do have 10 cases per 100,000 population. And even in the latest statistics, only 58 percent survive for more than five years, despite all the improvements in treatment," Silverman said. The National Cancer Institute estimates that 30,000 new cases of oral cancer will be diagnosed in the United States this year, with 8,000 deaths from the malignancy. The new study included nearly 170,000 residents from 13 population clusters in the Trivandrum district of Kerala, India. Residents of seven districts were given up to three rounds of screening by [...]