Health: Cancer

Lord Colwyn Excerpts

Wednesday 20th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Colwyn (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on securing time for this debate. Her excellent speech enables me to bring the dental profession to your Lordships’ attention—again. A speaking slot of four minutes is always very restrictive but I am pleased to be able to make reference to dental professionals, most of whom play an important role in the detection, diagnosis and treatment of many forms of oral cancer.

As we all know well, cancer remains one of the biggest killers and burdens on our health service. In turn, tobacco is by far the biggest preventable cause of cancer, with more than one-quarter of all cancer deaths in the UK being linked to it. Cancers of the head and neck are among the ones most directly linked to smoking, second only to lung cancer. Two-thirds of all cases are as a direct result of tobacco use and as many as nine in 10 cases could be prevented. Oral cancer is also one of the fastest-increasing types of cancer, with cases up by almost 40% in the last decade alone. With almost 7,000 patients diagnosed every year, it now kills more people in the UK than cervical and testicular cancers combined.

With tobacco cessation and early diagnosis being the keys to reducing the incidence and improving the survival rates of this particular kind of cancer, we cannot overlook the important contribution dentists can make in the fight against this terrible disease. Dental professionals are on the front line in the fight against mouth cancer. Dentists are uniquely placed to diagnose oral cancers very early, before the patient notices any symptoms and seeks help. This is crucial, as mouth cancer patients have a 90% chance of survival if the condition is detected early, but this plummets to just 50% if their diagnosis is delayed. The British Dental Association and Cancer Research UK have recently jointly launched a very useful new scheme called the Oral Cancer Toolkit, which improves dentists’ knowledge of how to prevent and detect oral cancer. This is something that could and should be built on.

Being the only health professionals who regularly see healthy patients, members of the dental team are also in an ideal position to help prevent future cases of oral and other cancers by becoming involved in tobacco cessation. They update the patient’s medical history form, which includes questions on tobacco, during every visit and can often see visual evidence of smoking or chewing tobacco during a check-up or treatment. Trials have revealed that dentists with the right support and access to information on tobacco counselling can contribute significantly to tobacco control measures in the community. It is important that the dental profession is involved in the development and delivery of the new tobacco control strategy, as it is a potential resource we truly cannot afford not to harness in the fight against cancer.