The Oral Cancer Foundation is a national public service, non-profit entity designed to reduce suffering and save lives through prevention, education, research, advocacy, and support activities. Oral cancer is the largest group of those cancers which fall into the head and neck cancer category. Common names for it include such things as mouth cancer, tongue cancer, and throat cancer. Approximately 35,000 people in the US will be newly diagnosed with oral cancer in 2008. This is the third year in a row in which there has been an increase in the rate of occurrence of oral cancers, in 2007 there was a major jump of over 11% in that single year. 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 (human papilloma virus version 16), a newly identified etiology, and the same one which is responsible for the vast majority of cervical cancers in women.
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, and a person dies from oral cancer every hour of every day. If you add the sub category of laryngeal cancers, the rates of occurrence (about 10,000 additional new cases per year) and death are significantly higher. When found early, oral cancers have an 80 to 90 % survival rate. Unfortunately at this time, the majority are found as late stage cancers, and this accounts for the very high death rate of about 45% at five years from diagnosis, and high treatment related morbidity in survivors. Late stage diagnosis is not occurring because these cancers are hard to discover, it is because of a lack of public awareness coupled with the lack of a national program for opportunistic screenings which would yield early discovery by medical and dental professionals. Worldwide the problem is far greater, with new cases annually exceeding 481,000.
This site will provide you with hundreds of pages of information about the rates of occurrence, risk factors which lead to oral cancer, signs and symptoms, treatments, current research, complications of treatment, nutrition, and current oral cancer related news.
A FREE patient / survivor discussion forum is open to the public, where those currently fighting oral cancer can gain insights and inspiration from those who have been there before them. A comprehensive resource list is available to link you to other pertinent oral cancer data on the web and elsewhere for patients, caregivers, and the public.
