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 LOS ANGELES (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- One person dies of oral cancer every hour in the United States. Only half of those diagnosed with the disease will survive more than five years, but if it's caught early enough, there's about a 90-percent chance of survival. Now you can help stop this disease, and it won't hurt a bit.
His speech is impaired, some of his neck is gone, and he can't swallow without water. All because no one noticed a lesion in Brian Hill's mouth until it was late-stage cancer.
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"I ate healthy. I never smoked a day in my life," Brian says. "I'm going, 'How could this be happening to me?'"
It may not have happened if the discovery made in this UCLA lab had come six years earlier. Turns out your saliva contains better biomarkers 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," David Wong, DMD, a professor at the UCLA School of Dentistry tells Ivanhoe.
The test is simple. You spit into a tube. It's taken to the lab and tested for biomarkers that signal cancer -- similar to the PSA test for prostate cancer, but it's nearly 20-percent more accurate.
Dr. Wong says, "Within 24 hours, it will be known if you are at risk for oral cancer in your mouth or you have a clean bill of health."
If found early, treatment can be as simple as removing a pre-cancerous lesion with a laser.
He adds, "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."
 While Brian is now cancer-free, he and wife Ingrid know the pain of catching this disease too late. They hope this test will save others from the same fate.
The saliva test is about 82-percent accurate at detecting oral cancer. Dr. Wong says it should be available through your doctor or dentist within two years. He believes it may eventually be used to screen for breast and pancreatic cancer as well as Alzheimer's disease.
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
If you would like more information, please contact:
David T.W Wong, D.M.D., D.M.Sc
UCLA School of Dentistry
73-017 Center for Health Sciences
10833 Le Conte Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90095
dtww@ucla.edu
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