Can tongue cancer be cured?

Tongue cancer is familiar to everyone. Its incidence is getting higher and higher, which seriously harms our health. People with tongue cancer suffer from pain every day, and their lives become a mess. Many people ask me if tongue cancer can be cured. I have collected a lot of information. Now let's learn about this question with everyone!

Early stage tongue cancer is the golden period for treatment, and it is hopeful to be cured through reasonable treatment. Now let’s learn about the treatment options for tongue cancer:

Early-stage, well-differentiated tongue cancer can be treated with radiotherapy, simple surgical resection, or cryosurgery. Advanced tongue cancer should be treated with comprehensive treatment, using radiotherapy plus surgery or triple (chemotherapy, surgery, radiotherapy) or quadruple (triple plus traditional Chinese medicine or immunotherapy) therapy according to different conditions.

1. Radiation therapy

It can be used as an adjuvant treatment before and after surgery for advanced tongue cancer cases.

Indications

Radiation therapy for tongue cancer is used for:

1. Radical radiotherapy for T1 and T2 lesions in the anterior tongue without invasion of the floor of the mouth.

2. Preoperative or postoperative radiotherapy: Patients with late T2, T3 and some T4 tumors can undergo preoperative or postoperative radiotherapy.

3. Palliative radiotherapy Palliative radiotherapy or combined chemotherapy may be considered for patients with advanced lesions who have no surgical indications, contraindications to surgery or refuse surgery.

2. Surgical treatment

It is the main method for treating tongue cancer. For T1 cases, wedge-shaped resection more than 1 cm away from the lesion can be performed and sutured directly; for T2-T4 cases, hemiglossectomy or even total glossectomy should be performed. As an important organ for chewing and speech, reconstruction should be performed when more than 1/2 of the tongue is missing.

3. Chemotherapy

Cryosurgery can be considered for T1 and T2 tongue cancer.

Management of metastatic disease

Due to the high metastasis rate of tongue cancer, all cases except T1 should be considered for selective neck dissection at the same time; for patients with clinically positive lymph nodes, therapeutic neck dissection should be performed at the same time.

The above are the treatment methods for tongue cancer. If tongue cancer is in the early stage, it can be treated with surgery. In the middle stage, surgery combined with radiotherapy and chemotherapy can also be considered. If it is in the late stage, radiotherapy and chemotherapy can be considered to improve symptoms and prolong the patient's survival. Therefore, tongue cancer should be treated in a regular hospital in time, and it can be cured in the early stage.