Micronucleus formation in peripheral‐blood lymphocytes from smokers and the influence of alcohol‐ and tea‐drinking habits

Abstract

In recent years, studies on the genotoxic effects of smoking and its modifying factors have been widely followed with interest. In this report, frequencies of micronuclei (MNF) in peripheral-blood lymphocytes in 220 healthy smokers have been detected by the micronucleus test by finger-skin puncture, which needs only 1 to 2 drops of peripheral blood. On the basis of analysis of matched-pair data, the modifying effects of alcohol and tea are discussed. Our results show that (I) smoking significantly increases MNF in lymphocytes as compared with healthy non-smokers (p less than 0.01); (2) alcohol significantly increases MNF in smokers (p less than 0.01); (3) tea decreases MNF induced by smoking (p less than 0.01). Therefore, the anti-carcinogenic role of tea merits further study.

Genetic Damage in Exfoliated Cells of the Uterine Cervix

“…This effect was also observed in other cell types. 15,25,36,37,50,51 The observation that the heaviest smokers showed a higher number of MNs than nonsmokers supports this suggestion and could indicate a dose-dependent effect. This suggestion is supported by the observation that MN occurrence in nonsmokers and smokers of a few cigarettes per day was not different.…”

Molecular epidemiology of smoking and lung cancer

“…Chromosomal damage can be measured using classical cytogenetic methods, micronuclei formation (Schmid, 1975;Xue et al, 1992), COMET (Poli et al, 1999;Speit and Hartmann, 1999), fluorescent in situ hybridization, or PCR methods assessing loss of heterozygosity (using tandem repeats or comparative genomic hybridization) where the latter two methods can be used for morphologically appearing cells. Use of mutations in reporter genes, such as HPRT (Bailar, 1999;Hou et al, 1999) or GPA have been used, but it is better to identify mutation rates in cancer susceptibility genes such as p53 (Brennan et al, 1995;Valkonen and Kuusi, 1998) or K-ras (Scott et al, 1997;Slebos et al, 1991;Valkonen and Kuusi, 1998;Yakubovskaya et al, 1995).…”

Chemopreventive effect of green tea (Camellia sinensis) against cigarette smoke-induced mutations (SCE) in humans

“…These studies demonstrated that either oral or topical administration of green tea or its major chemical constituent, epigallocatechin gallate, prevented tumor initiation and promotion [8,16]. In human subjects, tea consumption has been shown to decrease micronucleus formation induced by smoking [29]. HPLC analysis of green tea has shown it to be composed of several polyphenols (as much as 30% by dry weight), most of which are catechins: epigallocatechin gallate (15.1%), epigallocatechin (6.9%), epicatechin gallate (3.0%), epicatechin (1.8%), and caffeine (8.1%) [30].…”