Throat cancer, often associate with oral cancer, affects the throat. A significant amount of people every year are diagnosed and die of this cancer, but if diagnosed early it is can be cured. In this video learn more about this cancer and how to prevent and treat it.
JUSTIN C.K. DAVIS, M.D.: Hi. I'm Dr. Justin Davis. Today, I will be telling you a little bit about throat cancer. Now, throat cancer, often associated with oral cancer, is a kind of cancer that affects your throat, that is the part of the body just behind the back of the tongue and just above where you are breathing tubes or your esophagus begin. Those are the parts where air goes down or the food goes down. So approximately, maybe this part of your body may be associated with throat cancer. Now, today in America, nearly 30,000 people every year are diagnosed with either throat or oral cancer, and up to 7000 people will die annually in the United States from the same problem. The good new is, is if you catch it early it can be very treatable although it is in a little bit of an awkward place and can sometimes be difficult to get to. What are the symptoms if you have throat cancer? Well, often you may not see it right away because of its location, but once you start to have symptoms it has gotten a little bit bigger and may be causing problems such as difficulty swallowing or maybe you feel like something is constantly stuck in your throat, or maybe you have a persistent sore throat and it just is not going away even after use of antibiotics. Other symptoms may be coughing or spitting up blood, or maybe you can have some kind of ulceration or mass that is growing there or enlarged lymph nodes. If you have any of these, it is always important to bring it to the attention of the doctor right away. The reason? Well, so that we can treat it properly. When caught early enough, it is a very treatable disease. Usually treatment will involved removing the cancer. That will mean surgery in most cases. The good news is that after it is removed, there are plenty of kinds of techniques that have been developed to try to reconstruct the area very closely to how it looked before so that you can look and act normally. Other treatments will include radiation therapy and sometimes chemotherapy to try to get rid of the rest of the cancer cells. How can you prevent this? Well, most throat cancers are caused by excessive use of tobacco products, either chewing tobacco or inhaled tobacco products, or excessive alcohol consumption. There are some other causes, but those are the most common. So, if you have some kind of problem that you think may be associated with the symptoms of oral cancer or throat cancer, then it is important to let a doctor know right away, because the earlier we being treatment the better. Also, it may be something else that it is not a cancer at all but still deserves the attention and evaluation of a doctor so they can be treated properly.
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