見逃さないでその症状！ : 悪性病変の可能性はありませんか？

Patients with orofacial symptoms caused by malignant diseases, which should be treated by medical doctors, sometimes visit dental clinics during the initial consultation. The delay of getting an accurate diagnosis will lead to poor prognosis including death of patients. Therefore, dentists should be able to notice some symptoms related to malignant diseases. The signs and symptoms commonly associated with such patients are as follows.
1) Numb chin syndrome, 2) Swelling of palate and neck without pain, 3) Trismus, and 4) Macroglossia. In this article, we report the process from the initial visit until the accurate diagnosis of the patient with such symptoms, and present some comments about the signs and symptoms that may give us clues of malignancy.