With people consuming more alcohol during the pandemic, our drinking habits could be setting us up a for a future spike in oral cancer cases—though there’s good reason to be optimistic about faster and better tools for early diagnosis. Kathy Graham reports

“…another research project at the Melbourne Dental School and DHSV aims to identify patients more likely to develop oral cancer, without invasive biopsies.

The project uses OptiScan’s state-of-the-art confocal laser endomicroscope (CLE). The hand-held microscope uses a laser light and confocal optics to painlessly perform ‘digital biopsies’.

With the microscope, tissue can be viewed in 3D with 1000-times magnification. This could allow clinicians and surgeons to diagnose cancerous tissue in real time, reducing or eliminating the need to have one or more biopsies taken and sent to a laboratory for analysis.

“We’re quite excited about the intra-oral confocal microscope. They’ve developed a state-of-the-art machine and we intend to assess different mouthwashes that make the nuclei glow, fluoresce, because we’re actually looking at the fluorescent changes,” Professor McCullough says.”

Read the full article here: https://bitemagazine.com.au/alcohol-and-oral-cancer/