The UK’s chronic lack of access to dentists, especially NHS dentists, is leading to mouth cancers not being spotted or treated early enough, a health charity has warned.
The Oral Health Foundation has told the BBC that its latest figures suggest mouth cancers killed more than 3,000 people in 2021, up 46% from 2,075 a decade ago.
The charity used a Freedom of Information request to obtain the data from the Office for National Statistics, Public Health Wales, Public Health Scotland, and the Northern Ireland Cancer Registry.
There were 9,860 cases of mouth cancer in the UK in 2020/21, up 12% from the previous comparable year, according to the foundation.
The latest warning follows the call over the summer for “urgent and fundamental” reform of NHS dentistry by the Health and Social Care Committee.
A BBC Newsnight investigation last year also found eight in 10 NHS practices were not taking on children and that in a third of more than 200 council areas, no dentists were taking on adult NHS patients. Researchers were unable to find a single practice accepting new adult NHS patients in Lancashire, Norfolk, Devon or Leeds.
Dentistry in crisis
Warnings of dentistry crisis amid rising costs and reduced access
Oral Health Foundation chief executive Nigel Carter said dental check-ups “are a key place for identifying the early stage of mouth cancer”.
He added: “With access to NHS dentistry in tatters, we fear that many people with mouth cancer will not receive a timely diagnosis.”
Early detection results for mouth cancer can result in a roughly 90% survival rate, compared with 50% following a delayed diagnosis.
“Every dental check-up doubles as an oral-cancer screening,” Eddie Crouch, chairs of the British Dental Association, told the BBC. The barriers to accessing dentists would, he argued, “inevitably cost lives”.
Head and neck cancers are the eighth most common cancer in the UK and in England more than two-thirds of mouth cancers are diagnosed in men. Most cases are linked to smoking, although alcohol misuse and human papillomavirus (HPV) infection through oral sex have been linked to the rise.
About a third of such cancers are on the tongue, but they can also be on the lips, gums and parts of the throat.
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