Here, in NEWPORT HEALTHY SMILES another new way to test for oral cancer before incisional biopsy is  -- a system called Oral CDx.  Dr. Ling and Dr. Wong use a small brush to gather cell samples of a suspicious area.  The specimen is then sent to a lab for computer analysis. In a recent study of 945 patients, Oral CDx detected all cases of oral cancer correctly, even when some other dentists didn't suspect the presence of cancer from the lesion. 

This oral brush biopsy procedure is simple, and can be done right in the dentist's chair. It results in very little or no pain or bleeding, and requires no topical or local anesthetic. Firm pressure with a circular brush is applied to the suspicious area. The brush is then rotated five to ten times, causing some pinpoint bleeding or light abrasion. The cellular material picked up by the brush is transferred to a bar-coded glass slide, preserved, and dried. The slide is then mailed to a laboratory along with written documentation about the patient and a detailed description of the questionable area of the mouth.

At the laboratory, a computer-aided scanner helps identify and display individual cells which may be malignant. If suspect cells are identified by the computer, a pathologist then examines the identified cells to determine the final diagnosis. A negative result of course, confirms that the cells are benign. In samples that are judged to be cancerous, a printout of the abnormal cells from the computer display and a written pathologist's report are returned to the dentist. It is usually recommended that a positive result be followed with a conventional incisional biopsy. This is because the sample type taken by the brush technique does not provide the cells in any relationship to each other. In order to properly now determine the extent of the cancer, a sample which also provides the architecture, or the actual relationship of the different layers of cells to each other is necessary.

The benefits of CDx are the possible avoidance of surgical biopsy, and the ease of sampling, which can be performed during a routine dental examination. Because of its ease of use, and the elimination of any surgical procedure, no matter how small, the CDx allows tissue samples to be taken early in the process of areas that in the past, the doctor may have decided to just watch for while. With oral cancer, an earlier determination is always important, for both your piece of mind, and because cancers caught earlier have a higher success rate of being cured.

Information taken as a courtesy from Oral CDx.