Brian Hill knows how tough life is if you don't catch oral cancer until late.

LOS ANGELES -- One person dies of oral cancer every hour in the United States. Only half of those diagnosed with the disease will survive more than five years, but if it's caught early enough, there's about a 90 percent chance of survival. Now you can help stop this disease, and it won't hurt a bit.

His speech is impaired, some of his neck is gone, and he can't swallow without water. All because no one noticed a lesion in Brian Hill's mouth until it was late-stage cancer.

"I ate healthy. I never smoked a day in my life," Brian said. "I'm going, 'How could this be happening to me?'"

It may not have happened if the discovery made in this UCLA lab had come six years earlier. Turns out your saliva contains better biomarkers than blood for detecting oral cancer.

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	Saliva detects oral cancer One person dies of oral cancer every hour in the United States. Now simply testing your saliva could be enough to detect this dangerous cancer in its early stages.

"We don't have to stick a needle into someone's vein or give someone a cup and have them go to the bathroom, which could be embarrassing, and it's non-painful," said Dr. David Wong, a professor at the UCLA School of Dentistry.

The test is simple. You spit into a tube. It's taken to the lab and tested for biomarkers that signal cancer -- similar to the PSA test for prostate cancer, but it's nearly 20 percent more accurate.

Dr. Wong said, "Within 24 hours, it will be known if you are at risk for oral cancer in your mouth or you have a clean bill of health."

If found early, treatment can be as simple as removing a pre-cancerous lesion with a laser.

	Now your saliva can detect oral cancers.

"In all cancers, I don't care which you pick, where we've seen a drop in the death rate, it hasn't been through some miracle drug. It's always been early detection," explained Dr. Wong.

While Brian is now cancer-free, he and wife Ingrid know the pain of catching this disease too late. They hope this test will save others from the same fate.

The saliva test is about 82 percent accurate at detecting oral cancer. Dr. Wong said it should be available through your doctor or dentist within two years. He believes it may eventually be used to screen for breast and pancreatic cancer as well as Alzheimer's disease.

	Research summary
BACKGROUND: Oral cancer is the sixth most common cancer in the United Sates. The survival rate of oral cancer is lower than that of cervical cancer, Hodgkin's disease, cancer of the brain, liver, testes, kidneys and skin. It is the cause of nearly 8,000 deaths a year in the United States. Translated, that means one patient dies from oral cancer every hour. Worldwide, it can affect 350,000 annually. Smoking and other tobacco use are associated with 70 percent to 80 percent of oral cancer cases. Men are affected twice as often as women, particularly men older than age 40. Other than the lips, the most common areas for oral cancer are on the tongue and floor of the mouth. THE PROBLEM: Oral cancer is particularly dangerous because it has a high risk of producing second, primary tumors. Early detection is the key. The mortality rate of this cancer is high because it's often discovered too late in development. Cancer is diagnosed in stages I-IV. Detection of an oral cancer in stage I will carry a likely prognosis of an 80-percent survival rate. However, the same lesion, if progressed to stage III, will carry a 20-percent survival rate. Despite numerous advances in treatment, oral squamous cell carcinoma has just a five-year survival rate, which is the worst of all cancer death rates. The five-year survival rate has not improved in the past three decades. SCREENING FOR CANCER: Currently, the most definitive procedure to detect oral cancer involves a visit to the physician's office, a scalpel biopsy usually on the tongue or gums, followed by a histopathologist evaluation by a pathologist. NEW METHOD: Now, oral fluids (saliva) are being viewed as a way to screen for the cancer. Dr. David Wong, D.M.D., D.M.Sc, refers to saliva as "the mirror of the body, in the sense that it is the perfect medium to be explored for health and disease surveillance." Saliva contains specific biomarkers associated with either a healthy or diseased state. Because collecting saliva is noninvasive, it is the preferable way to detect and monitor the biomarkers. Doctors hope that in the future, a patient will be able to simply spit into a vial and avoid a more invasive biopsy. UNDER STUDY: The use of saliva for oral cancer screening is still in its infancy, but it does look very promising. To date, two salivary proteins, IL8 and thioredoxin, which can discriminate saliva of oral cancer from control subjects, have been discovered. IL8 is significantly higher in saliva of oral cancer patients and is highly discriminatory of detecting oral cancer in saliva. FUTURE: Miniaturized diagnostic technologies will be able, with minute amounts of body fluids, specifically saliva, to yield critical patient information reflecting a healthy or diseased status. Lifestyle choices still remain the biggest cause of oral cancer. Some things you can do to prevent cancer: minimize or avoid smoking or other tobacco use, minimize or avoid alcohol use, practice good oral hygiene, and have dental problems corrected.

	For more information, contact:
David T.W Wong, D.M.D., D.M.Sc UCLA School of Dentistry 73-017 Center for Health Sciences 10833 Le Conte Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90095 dtww@ucla.edu