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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Early oral cancer detection could be a painless swab away.
According to The Oral Cancer Foundation, oral cancer will kill roughly one person every hour this year, often due to late detection and treatment. But promising results from a study on saliva could pave the way to earlier detection.
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Previous studies have shown saliva can be a useful diagnostic tool for many diseases, but a recent study out of UCLA is the first to show saliva can help doctors detect early oral cancer cell growth. With this discovery, researchers are hopeful a painless saliva test could be the future of oral cancer detection.
This test is currently not available, but we are developing point-of-care microfluidic devices to detect these markers that we can use in clinical trials, Shen Hu, Ph.D., study author and assistant professor of Oral Biology and Proteomics at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Dentistry, was quoted as saying.
Using saliva and specific biomarkers, researchers were able to confirm the presence of oral cancer 93 percent of the time.
SOURCE: Clinical Cancer Research, 2008
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