Mouth Is Indicator Of Overall Health, Says Dental School Professor

One day in medical clinics, the big picture of a patient's state of
health may be found in little pictures from the mouth, says Li Mao, MD,
a new 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 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's previous position was at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson
Cancer Center in Houston, the largest stand-alone cancer center in the
country with more than 17,000 employees. However, he sometimes had
difficulty recruiting patients with oral precancerous conditions for
clinical trials to find novel early diagnosis and prevention 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 research.

"That's why I came here. Dean Stohler is a visionary with great
interest in research 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 important technology
in cancer studies and biomarker discovery. He says that 50 percent of
oral cancer patients get diagnosed too late.

He plans to make significant changes in dental oncology research and
education in his new position. "Dentists are trapped in their current
technology," he says. "Most work in small operations that are
procedure-oriented. Dentists are mostly individual practitioners with
little interest in medical research. On the other hand, medical doctors
often work within a hospital system" with more opportunities for
research and development.

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

He says his team in Houston was among the first demonstrating that
molecular markers are potentially powerful in cancer early detection
and risk assessment through a series of high-profile publications.

Under Stohler's direction, the Dental School last year increased its
sponsored research funding by 47 percent, largely by focusing on
cooperative 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: University of Maryland Baltimore