Does tongue cancer require long-term medication?

Tongue cancer is the most common oral cancer. More than 85% of cases occur on the tongue, and most occur on the side edge of the middle 1/3 of the tongue. Most are squamous cell carcinomas; a few are adenocarcinomas, lymphoepithelial carcinomas, or undifferentiated carcinomas. So do you need to take long-term medication if you have tongue cancer? Let's find out.

Treatments for tongue cancer include:

(I) Treatment of primary lesions Radiotherapy, simple surgical resection or cryosurgery can be considered for early-stage well-differentiated tongue cancer. Comprehensive treatment should be used for advanced tongue cancer, using radiotherapy plus surgery or triple (chemotherapy, surgery, radiotherapy) or quadruple (triple plus traditional Chinese medicine or immunotherapy) therapy according to different conditions.

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

2. Surgery: 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 mastication and speech, reconstruction should be performed when more than 1/2 of the tongue is missing.

3. Chemotherapy: Preoperative induction chemotherapy can be performed for advanced cases. Chemotherapy has a good effect on tongue cancer and is expected to improve the patient's survival rate.

4. Cryotherapy: Cryotherapy can be considered for T1 and T2 tongue cancer.

(II) Treatment of metastatic lesions: 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.

Tongue cancer requires early treatment, and surgery can cure tongue cancer relatively quickly, so I feel that long-term medication is not necessary for tongue cancer.