Mouth is indicator of overall health, says dental school professor

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

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

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

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

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

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