Abstract

Background: Smoking and alcohol related head and neck cancer is a major concern of health risk in urban and rural areas of India.
Objective: This study was aimed to determine the frequency of polymorphisms in DNA repair genes, hOGG1 at codon (cd) 326 and APE1 at cd 148 in patients of oral cancer from Maharashtra and to evaluate their association with oral cancer development.
Materials and Methods: Polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) to analyze gene polymorphisms in 200 patients with oral cancer and 200 age and sex matched disease-free controls were used. Result: The results obtained from the present study indicated that there was no significant difference in the genotype distribution between oral cancer patients and controls for APE1 (p > 0.05). The result showed that allele frequencies of hOGG1Cys326 (OR = 8.73; 95% CI = (2.51-30.39); p = <0.0001) genotype significantly increased the risk of head and neck cancer. Conclusion: This study indicates that polymorphisms in cd326 of hOGG1 gene could play a role in modifying genetic susceptibility of individual to head and neck cancer in Maharashtrian patients.