Recognizing Symptoms During Head and Neck Cancer Awareness Month

April serves as Head and Neck Cancer Awareness Month and aims to address unmet needs within the landscape. According to the Oral Cancer Foundation, recognizing this awareness month is important because approximately 58,500 people will be newly diagnosed with oral cancer this year and 132 individuals will be newly diagnosed with oral cancer every day in the United States.

Dr. Zafar Sayed sat down for an interview with CURE to discuss the importance of recognizing Head and Neck Cancer Awareness Month, as well as highlights early symptoms of the disease.

Sayed is an assistant professor of surgery (otolaryngology) and a part of the Head and Neck Cancers Program at the Yale School of Medicine, located in New Haven, Connecticut, and specializes in otolaryngology surgery with a focus on head and neck surgical oncology at Yale Cancer Center, Yale Medicine.

Transcript:

The head and neck are so important to us as human beings. Almost everything we think of as being part of the human experience comes from this area: your eyesight, your sense of smell, your ability to speak, your facial movements and emotion. It's such a critical area that when we talk about cancers of this spot, we are so concerned with maintaining function. Therefore, we want to catch tumors early, and that's why raising public awareness is so important.

The head and neck tend to be a spot that can really be damaged by ultraviolet radiation, so making sure folks are aware to check for skin cancers in this area is key. Tobacco and alcohol are risk factors for the development of mouth and voice box cancers; throat cancers are now mostly human papillomavirus related. We, as head and neck surgeons, also deal a lot with thyroid cancer, which has also seen a rise in incidence. There are many different tumors that affect this area, and it's just important to know what to look for so we can catch them early and hopefully stave off any major issues.

The evolution in treatment, at least on the surgical side, has been to try to make things a little less invasive. Many of the surgeries we used to do decades ago, even before I was a physician, would involve placing tracheostomy tubes (breathing tubes in the neck) and feeding tubes (something called a G-tube, a gastrostomy tube, was very common). What we're doing with newer techniques is trying to limit the number of patients who need those measures long term. With some of the newer surgeries, you may need a tracheostomy or a feeding tube, but usually, that will be temporary, and by the time you go home, a lot of that has been removed so you can resume function. So, that is where a lot of our work is focused

There are also some studies looking at how much of a margin around the cancer we need to resect, how much we need to take. We have found, especially in the oropharynx, around tonsil tumors and invasive tongue tumors, that the margin can be a bit smaller for HPV tumors compared to what we've classically needed to do for tobacco-related cancers. So, the combination of less invasive techniques and decreasing the amount of normal tissue that needs to be removed has been really helpful over the last few years.

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