COMPARATIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE COURSE OF BUCCAL EPITHELIUM DIFFERENTIATION AS RELATED TO GENDER
Oral mucosa reflects the conditions of the digestive tract and immune system and the general levels of activity and proliferation of body cell populations. The objective of the present study was to assess the processes of cell differentiation in the buccal epithelium as they relate to gender. Buccal epithelium from 50 young male and female subjects were taken with spatulas, transferred to microscope slides, dried in open air for 3 to 5 minutes, stained using Giemsa-Romanowsky method or with nitroblue tetrazolium, and then subjected to morphologic and microscopic examinations to define the ratios of different forms of epithelial cells as they depend of donor’s gender and condition. The significance of differences between the groups of study subjects was estimated using Student’s t-test. In cases where the distributions of parameters were significantly different from normal, the nonparametric Mann-Whitney U-test was used instead of t-test. Some of intersex differences found in the qualitative and quantitative composition of cell populations are attributable to estrogen-progestin interactions. The main specific feature of females is the presence of rare parabasal epithelial cells in cell populations. The proportion of surface epithelial cells in females is significantly increased in parallel with decreased squamous scales suggesting the predominance of apoptosis, the genetically determined cell death, in buccal epithelium keratinization pathways in females.