Dental School Professor Belive, Mouth Is Indicator Of Overall Health

One day in medical clinics, the big movie of a patient's state of health may be set up in seldom pictures from the mouth, says Li Mao, MD, a inexperienced professor at the University of Maryland Dental School.

The mouth or oral cavity area is an excellent indicator of the whole body's health, says Mao, who is the chair of the inexperienced Department of Oncology and Diagnostic Sciences at the School.

Mao newly joined the Dental School to be at the forefront of a effort to retool dental education, he says, to brand dentists practice more within the bigger health care community.

Future lung cancer prevention trials, for example, could soon be designed so that surface tissues indoors the cheek could be checked to find out tobacco-induced ruin in the lungs, according to a investigate led by Mao last year published in the journal Cancer Prevention Research.

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"We hypothesized that tobacco-induced atomic alterations in the oral epithelium are similar to those in the lungs," says Mao. "This authority have broader implications for using the mouth as a diagnostic pointer for general health."

University of Maryland Dental School Dean Christian S. Stohler, DMD, DrMedDent, a leader in the campaign to retool dental education, says, "I feel that dentists should frolic a major role in arresting of cancer and Dr. Mao is the prominent oral cancer researcher in the country. He crosses the bridge in the middle of medicine and dentistry. Being a physician helps expand dental health care and he wants to exchange how patients are being treated because his background is in head and neck cancer."

Mao's previous view was at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, the largest stand-alone cancer focus of attention in the country with more than 17,000 employees. However, he sometimes had difficulty recruiting patients with oral precancerous conditions for clinical trials to feel novel initially diagnosis and arresting measures. Mao decided to come to the University of Maryland Dental School, where, he says, "there are plenty of patients and plenty of opportunities" for testing his theories and conducting his investigate.

"That's why I came here. Dean Stohler is a visionary with great interest in investigation like this, in biological systems. He also believes that the Dental School should not be isolated from the general medical community," says Mao.

Mao believes that system biology-based approaches the pinpointing of molecular changes in living tissue is becoming an significant technology in cancer studies and biomarker discovery. He says that 50 percent of oral cancer patients get diagnosed too late.

He plans to compel valuable changes in dental oncology study and instruction in his inexperienced put. "Dentists are trapped in their flow technology," he says. "Most operate in small operations that are procedure-oriented. Dentists are mostly individual practitioners with short time interest in medical investigation. On the other hand, medical doctors often function within a hospital system" with more opportunities for investigation and development.

Mao brings to the Dental School a focus on revealing and defining molecular and genetic changes in complicated upper lung and digestive tract malignancies, particularly head and neck cancer and lung cancer. "The significance of these alterations will allow us to advance novel strategies for assessment of cancer risk, initially diagnosis of cancer, subatomic classification, and treatment," he says.

He says his pull in Houston was among the first demonstrating that molecular markers are potentially strong in cancer initially detection and risk assessment through a row of high-profile publications.

Under Stohler's direction, the Dental School last year increased its sponsored explore funding by 47 percent, largely by focusing on concerted medical projects reaching far beyond traditional dental sciences. Projects in tissue regeneration, carcinogenesis, pain and neuroscience, and microbial pathogenesis expanded the most, Stohler says.

Source: medicalnewstoday.com
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