Saving Faces and the European Association for Cranio-Maxillofacial-Facial Surgery (EACMFS) partnership

Saving Faces will be partnering with the European Association for Cranio-Maxillofacial-Facial Surgery (EACMFS) for 3 years to serve education and excellence in clinical practice in the UK and across Europe.

The themes of the project will cover fields such as guidelines and protocols related to oral and maxillofacial surgery.

Mr Nick Kalavrezos, Senior President (Elect) of the EACMFS will formerly announce the project during their General Assembly in Rome in September 2024.

The Chief Executive of Saving Faces, Professor Iain Hutchison, is delighted about this new partnership and looks forward to working with the EACMFS.

Ground breaking UK research by Saving Faces on early mouth cancer saves 30,000 lives world wide every year

Surgery

The Findings Of the Research Study (SEND) – Update 27/04/2023

Original post can be found here.

The findings of the Selective Elective Neck Dissection (SEND study) funded by Elliott Bernerd, Robbie and Lisa Tchenguiz in memory of their mother Violet, Cancer Research UK, and Saving Faces, was published in the British Journal of Cancer.

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Global VRiMS

The UK’s surgical research charity Saving Faces and its national research centre NFORC are proud to support Professor Jag Dhanda of the Brighton Medical School and Helen Please of the Global Anaesthesia, Surgery and Obstetric Collaboration Trainee Collaboration as they launch Virtual Reality in Medicine and Surgery.

This is a world first training over 1,400 doctors from low-and middle-income countries today and over the next 4 days in real time at Brighton Medical School and Hospital how to perform life-saving surgery using virtual reality.

The use of virtual reality will immerse the doctors in the operations and dissections of how to perform life-saving surgery in African communities which are remote from major cities and hospitals.

You can listen to our Chief Executive Professor Iain Hutchison discussing VRiMS here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSatS0yabqU 

 

New PCR test for oral cancer set to revolutionise diagnosis and treatment

qMIDS, the world’s first rapid oral cancer test, has been developed by Queen Mary University of London and an international team of researchers. It has the potential to relieve pressure on the NHS and may improve the early detection of oral cancer.

Saving Faces has supported researchers at Queen Mary University of London who have developed the world’s first PCR test for mouth cancer. The test has now been proved with patients from China, India and the UK, with the results published in the international journal, Cancers. The inventor, Dr Muy-Teck Teh, named the test the Quantitative Malignant Index Diagnosis System (qMIDS).

qMIDS diagnostic accuracy would mean that 90% of low-risk patients could be discharged from hospital to go back to their dentist or GP for review. Or they might be tested in the dentist’s surgery and only referred to secondary care if they were high risk. High-risk cases could also be detected in the pre-cancer period and treated definitively, thereby saving the patient’s life with minor surgery, better cure rates and quality of life, as well as a huge reduction in health service costs.

The test process is largely automated, removing the need for expensive pathologists. There’s also no need for invasive biopsies. The tests can be carried out on multiple sites when patients have lesions affecting large areas throughout the mouth.

Co-study lead, Professor Iain Hutchison, stated: “qMIDS dramatically improves our management of mouth cancer and its pre-cancerous state, saving lives and healthcare costs. Surgeons and dentists anywhere in the world can use this test for minimally invasive tissue samples because all it needs is a PCR machine and the technician who operates it.

“qMIDS will help us identify patients with pre-malignancies that will never transform to cancer, so they can be reassured and discharged from hospital review. Patients with high-risk premalignancy can have minor surgery to remove the lesion before it has transformed to cancer, thereby curing the patient and saving them major surgery, which in turn reduces health service costs. It is a powerful tool especially when used in conjunction with conventional histopathology assessment.”

Read full journal article here

Read news coverage here

 

 

New publication shows uncertainty over the best way to treat wisdom tooth infection

Breaking news: A survey of 289 UK surgeons, led by Mr Geoff Chiu and conducted by Saving Faces and British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (BAOMS)  through their partnership in the National Facial Oral and Oculoplastic Centre (NFORC), illustrates the uncertainty over the best way to treat wisdom tooth infection and recommends further research. The results are now published in the British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery.

When there is no room in the jaw for a wisdom tooth to grow normally, it usually emerges at an angle or gets stuck.  These impacted wisdom teeth often become infected, damage adjacent teeth or cause other dental problems. As many of you probably know, these wisdom tooth problems are often very painful for the patient. Sometimes X-rays and scans show that the root of the infected tooth is very close to a nerve and needs to be treated with extra care, as there is a risk of permanent lip numbness if the nerve is damaged during the procedure. These are high-risk cases.

At least two vastly different methods can be recommended for the same patient depending on the surgeon they see.

The surgeon could take out the entire tooth including its roots. This is known as complete surgical removal. An alternative operation called coronectomy is available for the 1 in 5 patients who are at risk of nerve damage. This involves removing the visible part of the tooth while leaving the roots in the gum.

The publication concludes that coronectomy may prevent permanent nerve damage in high-risk cases, however there is a gap in evidence and knowledge to support coronectomy. This shows uncertainty over the best way to treat high-risk cases. As a result, further studies are needed to determine the effectiveness and safety of coronectomy.

Fortunately, NFORC is on the case. In partnership with Mr Geoff Chiu, Consultant Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon and Professor Paul Coulthard, Dean for Dentistry and Director at the Barts and The London School of Medicine & Dentistry, we will be carrying out further research on 4,000 patients to find out which procedure (complete surgical removal or coronectomy) benefits patients more and which have more complications.

We would like to thank Ahmed Omran, who first proposed the research, Geoff Chiu, Amrita Bose, Roberta Maroni (our very helpful statistician), Jagtar Dhanda, Douglas Hammond, Clare Moynihan, Antonio Ciniglio and the reviewers who have dedicated their time and efforts for the successful publication of this paper.

The current perspectives of the surgical management of mandibular third molars: the need for further research” is now published in the British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, which you can read here.

Masters student awarded distinction for work on facial injuries data collected by Saving Faces

Saving Faces and the British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (BAOMS), in conjunction with The Royal College of Emergency Medicine, undertook two national surveys on the incidence of facial injuries. The data collected represented the only large multi-centre prospective data-set on UK facial injuries presented to secondary care with over 14,700 data collected.

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BAOMS Chair Patrick Magennis comments on the SEND publication in The OTJ Journal November 2019 issue

“This open access paper funded by charity Saving Faces and Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is ground-breaking. OMFS cancer surgeons from all over the UK were involved in the study, and British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (BAOMS) is proud that this research was completed and published.

The study was possible because of a unique collaboration between 68 UK-based surgeons treating 614 patients at 27 UK hospitals. The research compared leaving or taking out neck glands that did not have obvious secondary cancers at the same time as removing the patient’s small mouth cancer. OMFS know that between 20 and 30 in every 100 patients with small mouth cancers have tiny microscopic cancer deposits in their neck glands that can’t be picked up by any scanners. Now OMFS have the evidence about the risks and benefits of removing the neck glands in early mouth cancer. This information will help patients participate in decisions about their treatment.

To mis-quote John F Kennedy in this the 50th anniversary year of the moon landings, OMFS surgeons want to do randomised surgical trials ‘not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone’.

This paper is a credit to all involved.”

– Patrick Magennis, British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (BAOMS) Chair and Saving Faces Deputy Chair of Trustees

Click here to read more about the SEND paper.

Click here to read the full November 2019 issue of The Operating Theatre Journal.

Operating-Theatre-Journal-November-2019

Ground breaking UK research by Saving Faces on early mouth cancer could save 30,000 lives world wide every year

Surgery

Headline News 17/10/2019: Findings of ground-breaking new surgical trial on mouth cancer published by the British Journal of Cancer

Access the recommendation on F1000Prime

The findings of the Selective Elective Neck Dissection (SEND study) funded by Elliott Bernerd (£600,000), Cancer Research UK, Robbie and Lisa Tchenguiz in memory of their mother Violet (£500,000), and Saving Faces, has been published for the first time in the British Journal of Cancer and has been recommended in the F1000 Prime as being of special significance in its field.

  • Patients with mouth cancer benefit from additional surgery
  • 30,000 more patients worldwide could be cured as a result of this finding

This work uses data provided by patients and collected by the NHS as part of their care and support.

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