Oral white lesions: pitfalls of diagnosis

General practitioners are often the first point of contact for patients with oral white lesions, which represent a wide spectrum of diagnoses of varying seriousness. Some clinical features are classical and others overlap between different diagnoses; they should be correlated with patient history, and sometimes other investigations, for diagnosis. Leukoplakia is a clinical term, and is a diagnosis of exclusion with no histopathological connotation. It has been redefined to describe a predominantly white lesion with premalignant potential. Patients with lesions that are potentially malignant should be referred to an oral medicine specialist or oral maxillofacial surgeon for systematic management.