Salivary Biomarkers: Toward Future Clinical and Diagnostic Utilities

Abstract

SUMMARY The pursuit of timely, cost-effective, accurate, and noninvasive diagnostic methodologies is an endeavor of urgency among clinicians and scientists alike. Detecting pathologies at their earliest stages can significantly affect patient discomfort, prognosis, therapeutic intervention, survival rates, and recurrence. Diagnosis and monitoring often require painful invasive procedures such as biopsies and repeated blood draws, adding undue stress to an already unpleasant experience. The discovery of saliva-based microbial, immunologic, and molecular biomarkers offers unique opportunities to bypass these measures by utilizing oral fluids to evaluate the condition of both healthy and diseased individuals. Here we discuss saliva and its significance as a source of indicators for local, systemic, and infectious disorders. We highlight contemporary innovations and explore recent discoveries that deem saliva a mediator of the body's physiological condition. Additionally, we examine the current state of salivary diagnostics and its associated technologies, future aspirations, and potential as the preferred route of disease detection, monitoring, and prognosis.

Use of IgG in Oral Fluid To Monitor Infants with Suspected Congenital Toxoplasmosis

“…Conversely, a positive test was associated with a very low probability for the presence of the disease. The low sensitivity observed (Table 1) may be due to the concentration of IgG in oral fluid being 10-fold lower than that in sera (23). Insufficient quantities of IgG due to inadequate sample collection were unlikely because the fluids were collected under the same conditions by doctors who followed the same protocol.…”

Preanalytical Variables Affecting the Integrity of Human Biospecimens in Biobanking

“…They are noninvasive methods, easy to collect at lower cost, can be used in clinically challenging situations (children, handi-capped individuals, patients afraid of needles), are safer to handle (66,67 ), and can be used for self-assessment and thus in cohorts with return of samples by mail. Saliva is used for a variety of analytes also measured in blood (67 ) and biomarker omics studies (66,67 ), such as metabolome, transcriptome, genome, proteome, miRNA (55 ), and microbiome profiling in disease detection (local and systemic) ( Table 5). A disadvantage is the low concentration of analytes (67 ).…”

Antibacterial efficacy of triple-layered poly(lactic-<i>co</i>-glycolic acid)/nanoapatite/lauric acid guided bone regeneration membrane on periodontal bacteria

“…Saliva has a direct antibacterial activity [18][19][20] and possesses antifungal and antiviral properties. The impregnation of a sample with saliva is crucial to mimic the actual oral physiological environment 21) .…”