Oral field cancerization: history and future perspectives

Notwithstanding extended surgical approaches or adjuvant chemoradiotherapy, the development of multiple neoplastic lesions arising in the oral cavity after treatment still represents a critical clinical challenge in the management of patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma. Such clinical behavior of oral squamous cell carcinoma is nowadays better known as "field" cancerization effect as suggested by Slaughter, the author that for the first time tried to describe it in a scientific paper. Field cancerization is now widely accepted not only in head and neck oncology but also in other anatomical districts as well as in different types of epithelial neoplasia. A brief history of the theory of field cancerization is here proposed and future perspectives deriving from new molecular techniques are discussed.