Oral cancer screenings are important to detect cancer at its earliest stages. At Spring Dental Arts in Spring, Texas, we screen your mouth and throat for cancer when you visit us during routine checkups. There’s nothing you need to do to prepare for an oral cancer screening.

Recommendations and Risk Factors

We screen for oral cancer at Spring Dental Arts to detect cancer in its early stages. Early detection means a better prognosis. According to studies, there’s no proof that screenings lower the number of deaths from oral cancer. Nonetheless, it’s easy to do during a checkup and completely painless.

Some people are at a higher risk of getting oral cancer compared to others. These are people who use tobacco, heavily use alcohol, and have already had oral cancer.

What We Look For

When we screen people for oral cancer, we look for any irregularities. These include ulcers or masses. We also look for discolored patches which are usually white or pinkish-red in color. Any of these could be benign, precancerous, or cancerous.

Additional tests may be needed if we notice any of the above findings. We might have to take a biopsy and send it to a lab for pathology. Sometimes findings are more likely to be benign, so we prefer to wait a couple of weeks to see if they go away on their own.

It’s not possible to diagnose cancer without a biopsy. Once we have the biopsy results, we’ll be able to give you your diagnosis. There’s no reason to panic before or after the biopsy results.

If it turns out to be cancer, at Spring Dental Arts, we’ll put a plan of management for you and answer any questions you may have. We’re here to assist you with anything you need.

There are no special preparations that you need to make before an oral cancer screening. If you wear removable dentures or retainers, then we’ll just need you to take them off, and that’s it. Screenings are completely painless, so there’s no reason to worry about discomfort.

Oral cancer screenings shouldn’t be worrying. We do them for all people during checkups.