ABSTRACT
Oral cancer is the sixth most common malignancy with almost 500,000 new cases reported worldwide annually. The diagnosis of oral cancer at an early stage has a good prognosis as the survival rate is high (around 80%). However, the majority of oral cancer cases are diagnosed at a later stage with a considerably poor 5-year survival rate of 50% according to the World Health Organization statistics. Thus, an effective management strategy for oral cancer will depend on its early identification and intervention which would pave the way for superior prognosis. Despite the obvious advantage of earlier diagnosis of oral cancer, no approach has yet proven to be a reliably successful in diagnosis of oral cancer at an early stage. At present, the primary line of screening of oral cancer is performed by visual inspection, which is a subjective examination. Among the screening tests or diagnostic aids now available for oral cancer, few (toluidine blue, brush biopsy, salivary, and serum biomarkers) have been utilized and studied for many years while others have recently become commercially available. This review provides a summary of all the diagnostic modalities that were used earlier and the newer more advanced techniques with merits and demerits of each technique described briefly
KEYWORDS: Biomarkers, Early diagnosis, Malignancy, Oral cancerous lesions, Oral precancerous lesions.