Background:
As the world is becoming advanced, the number of diseases also seems to be increasing. Mouth cancer and oral lesions are known as dangerous and fatal diseases. The experimentation is in the process. The problem is not new; it has been the cause of deaths of many patients since many decades. The increase in cancer patients has been recorded up to 43% in the last 8.1 years and it has been observed that most of the cancerous cells are malignant at the time of diagnosis and treatment.
It is mandatory for the physician or the dental experts to diagnose oral cancer in the early stage and remove the tumor along with safe margins to decrease the chances of reoccurrence of the disease.
The objective of the study is to detect the usefulness of the toulidine blue dye as a cost effective, less time consuming and a user-friendly screening tool for the tumor margins intra-operatively.
Methods:
Fifty patients with biopsy proven oral squamous cell carcinoma who were advised surgical resection as a treatment plan, independent of the grade and stage of the tumor, by the department of Oral and Maxillofacial surgery of Dow University of Health Sciences were considered to undergo intra-operative toluidine blue dye staining and the results were compared and confirmed by the frozen biopsy section of the same margin.
Results:
Total fifty patients were participated in this study involving multiple margins. 86% agreement was present between the dye and the biopsy and the sensitivity of the dye appears to be 74% as 20 cases out of 27 showed true positive results yet specificity of the dye remains 100% as all 23 cases displayed true negative results.
Conclusion:
Toluidine blue dye has demonstrated to be a safe, convenient and time saving method of screening of the margins as it takes less than 5 minutes in its application and result starts to appear in within 3 to 5 minutes. Yet bigger lesions are yet to be focused as they have chances of giving false results. Moreover there is room for research in this aspect as the screening character of this dye is yet to be proved.