Know Your Mouth

Oral Cancer Signs, Symptoms and Prevention

Let Sil-Dom Dental Clinic restore your teeth and keep them healthy!

​When it comes to tooth decay, catching it early can make all the difference. If you take action as soon as you notice minimal decay, it can often be repaired. Delaying treatment may cause extensive decay that will need to be removed.

At Sil-Dom Dental Clinic, we’ll recommend treatment based on the severity of the tooth decay. We will always discuss your options with you before proceeding with treatment.

Sil-Dom Dental Clinic is providing free Oral Cancer Screening in April to educate the community about oral health. While all patients routinely receive oral cancer screenings during regular visits, April is recognized as Oral Cancer Awareness Month by the Oral Cancer Foundation. Sil-Dom Dental Clinic is partnering with the Oral Cancer Foundation to bring community awareness about the important aspects of early screening and detection for this type of cancer.

It is not necessary to be a current Sil-Dom Dental Clinic patient to receive these screenings, and this is at no cost to you. Patients who are screened and need further evaluation will be referred to a specialist. Enhanced screenings are also available for an additional cost, and can help to identify suspicious lesions earlier. There are several important facts to recognize about oral cancer:

  • Oral cancer is now being diagnosed in younger age groups (20s and 30s), even if they don’t use tobacco products.
  • There continues to be an increase in the rate of occurrence of oral cancers.
  • There are two distinct pathways by which most people come to oral cancer. One is through the use of tobacco and alcohol, a long term historic problem and cause, and the other is through exposure to the HPV-16 virus. A small percentage of people do get oral cancers from no currently identified cause.
  • While some think this is a rare cancer, mouth cancer will be newly diagnosed in about 100 new individuals each day in the US alone. A person dies from oral cancer every hour of every day.
  • When found at early stages of development, people with oral cancers have an 80 to 90% survival rate.