Aim- Oral cancer is becoming the most common disease worldwide, rapidly increasing in tobacco exposed persons. We have studied the morphological as well as nuclear abnormalities in the buccal exfoliated cells in tobacco exposed persons in different forms. Method- The technique involves extermination of epithelial smear from oral cavity of four experimental groups like smoker, chewer of smokeless tobacco, smoker with chewing habits with respect to control. Subsequent nuclei staining for determination of prevalence of cells containing micronucleus and meta-nucleus and other nuclear anomalies can be classified as genome damage parameter and cell death parameters and both the parameters were observed in the mentioned experimental groups. It is a non- invasive direct techniques and repeated sampling is easier; therefore suitable for epidemiological studies. Result- The result shows significant amount of nuclear anomalies in tobacco exposed person in varying form as smoked and smokeless tobacco consumers in comparison to non exposed group. The result shows that, genome damage and cell death parameter has been found in elevated frequencies in tobacco chewer with smoking habits in comparison to the control one and the frequency of nuclear anomalies are 72.41±8.5% The smokeless tobacco chewers showed nuclear anomaly frequency in the range of 46.05±6.9% and only smoker groups shows the frequency of nuclear anomaly is 18.93±3.4. Conclusion- From the data as obtain from this study, it can be concluded that nuclear abnormalities occurs predominantly due to the exposure of tobacco, from which severity of DNA damage can be easily predicted successfully. So the risk of cancer onset may be avoided employing these simple techniques.
