Abstract

Oral cancers form a significant health burden in developing countries like India ^[1]. Studies have indicated that early detection of oral cancers can improve prognosis and increase survival rates to up to about 80%. ^[2] Tobacco is one of the strongest risk factors for oral cancers ^[3]. Visual inspection, followed by incisional biopsy and histopathology of suspicious lesions discovered during clinical examination is the current gold standard for diagnosis ^[4]. Due to its invasive nature, tissue biopsy is an unsuitable screening tool for mass populations who are at risk for developing oral cancer. Development of a rapid, non-invasive, label free method which will serve as a screening tool and enable detection of malignant and premalignant lesions in early stages is of immense importance for better disease management. Several minimally invasive Raman spectroscopy-based studies on blood, saliva, urine and exfoliated cells, have demonstrated the utility for the detection of a variety of cancers, including oral cancers by stratifying healthy and oral cancer subjects ^{[5] [6] [7]}. Urine has been successfully explored to study a number of diseases including cancers, and its collection is non-invasive and requires no expert medical practitioner. Since tobacco consumption is one of the major etiological factors for oral cancers, development of screening tools which can stratify tobacco habitués and oral cancer subjects is warranted. Such a tool can be used for mass screening and enable early detection of oral cancer. In this study, urine analysis using Raman spectroscopy has been explored to stratify tobacco habitués and oral cancer subjects.

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