Oral cancer screening: The importance of recognizing scientific evidence.

RAMADAS K, ARROSSI S, THARA S, SANKARANARAYANAN R

LANCET ONCOLOGY

ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC

Año: 2006 p. 962 - 963

1470-2045

Last month the Mouth Cancer Awareness campaign(Nov 12–18, 2006) in the UK aimed to increase publicawareness about a disease that causes 145 500 annualdeaths worldwide.1 However, the majority of these deathsare in developing countries, and the public should beaware that much of this burden is preventable through asimple technology that has been scientifi cally proven toreduce mortality from oral cancer in people exposed toits causative factors. In 2005, we published results froma randomised controlled trial (RCT) in Kerala, India, whichshowed that population-based oral visual inspection ofhigh-risk individuals could be an eff ective preventionstrategy.2 Overall, our data suggested that around37 000 deaths from oral cancer could be preventedworldwide using this low-cost technique. However, arecent systematic review3,4 by the Cochrane Collaborationconcluded there was insuffi cient evidence to recommendinclusion or exclusion of oral visual screening in the generalpopulation.