Lumps and bumps in the mouth and lips

Published on February 28, 2017   27 min

Other Talks in the Series: Oral & Maxillofacial Medicine

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0:00
My name is Nicholas Kalavrezos, and I'm a Consultant in Head & Neck/Reconstructive Surgery at University College London Hospital. The topic of my presentation today is "Lumps and Bumps in the Mouth and Lips".
0:17
Lumps and bumps of the mouth and the lips, broadly speaking, belong in four different categories: malformations, namely congenital lesions, traumatic, infections of inflammatory origin. And of course, last but not least, neoplasias.
0:38
A typical appearance of a lesion from the first category, from the malformations, are the low flow malformations which are manifested as bluish branchial compression lesions.
0:54
Capillary haemangiomas, indeed, belong also in the malformation category. And have usually a more subtle appearance of a bluish manifestation.
1:05
I will skip the rather typical traumatic lesions. And also at this point, the infections, and inflammatory manifestations. And I will concentrate, in the next few slides, in the most important pathology that may be manifested as a swelling of the mouth or of the lip. Indeed, these are the oral malignant and pre-malignant conditions.
1:29
At this point, I will emphasize some of the facts related to the most important underlying pathology of the mouth and lips swelling, namely the potential presence of cancer. The most common fact and the most known fact about oral cancer can be summarized as, oral cancer is the eighth most common solid tumor worldwide. It represents 4% of all malignancies. There are 42,000 new cases in Europe annually, 32,000 new cases in the US annually. And indeed, more than 5,000 new patients in the UK every year. And despite the advances in surgery and radiotherapy, the mortality rate has essentially remained unchanged for decades with a 5-year survival rate of 50%. Broadly speaking, this is indeed correct. I will make a small addition to say that the advances in reconstructive surgery, over the last 10-20 years, do seem to start having an impact on the overall survival rate. And therefore, I would possibly be able to revise this slide or the survival rate on this slide, still on anecdotal basis, from 50% rather to 55% to 60%. Regardless of this fact, though, we have to know that oral cancer remains a major killer with a rather still dim overall survival rate.