You gotta love saliva! Especially your own. Yes, our saliva has the answers when it comes to detecting diseases. Put away that scalpel or syringe because spit has in it the inexpensive solution to whether we have an illness or not. Saliva-based screening can provide the painless process to find out if we are sick or safely not. In the dental field, spit is now being used to identify signs of gum diseases and the risk of tooth decay.

Saliva-Based Testing For Gum Disease

Looking into the future one can predict that going to the dentist will soon be a completely different experience. Early warnings via spit testing could see a lot of the more torturous dental procedures become largely obsolete. Saliva based detection of diseases and even likely tooth decay could mean early intervention to avoid more costly and painful procedures. The truth is that many of us only see our dentists when it is an emergency and things have progressed so far they are past saving. Loss of teeth due to severe decay and gum disease. Preventative dentistry through things like spit testing could save us all a whole lot of money and heart ache. Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to suffer through the tooth pulling and bloody extractions? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could avoid the worst excesses of root canal therapy?

Spectroscopy & Spitting In The Eye Of Disease

If we, as human beings, can access affordable testing to pre-empt painful conditions our lives will be so much the better for it. One light-based technique is called Raman spectroscopy and it can scan our saliva to identify chemical changes which indicate disease. Reading the molecular patterns means that things like oral cancers, which are hard to detect early, can be red flagged before it’s too late. Like so much in life, timing is everything, and getting in early is the key to beating these diseases.

“A recent study even showed saliva could help distinguish between healthy people and those with mild cognitive impairment, a possible early sign of Alzheimer’s.”
– The Conversation

The Significant Advantages Of Saliva As Diagnostic Fluid

The science of spit and discovering gum disease. Spit, they say, has been neglected in favour of blood for too long in the medical fields. Whether it has lacked the drama of blood or been excluded on the basis of other unknown prejudices and biases remains a moot point. Its time has come, it seems.

“There are compelling reasons to use saliva as a diagnostic fluid to monitor health and disease. It meets the demands for inexpensive, noninvasive, and easy to use diagnostic methods. As a clinical tool, saliva has many advantages over serum. It is easy to collect, store, ship, and it can be obtained at low cost in sufficient quantities for analysis. For patients, the noninvasive collection techniques dramatically reduce anxiety and discomfort, and simplify procurement of repeated samples for longitudinal monitoring over time. This is an added advantage for its use in paediatric patients. For professionals, saliva collection is safer than blood tests, which could expose health care workers to HIV or hepatitis virus. Saliva is also a lot easier to handle for diagnostic procedures, since it does not clot, thus lessening the manipulations required. Saliva based diagnostics is therefore more accessible, accurate, less expensive, and presents less risk to the patient than current methodologies.”
– Ar P, Gulati A, Mehta D, Sugandhan S. Diagnostic applications of saliva in dentistry. Int J Clin Pediatr Dent. 2009 Sep;2(3):7-13. doi: 10.5005/jp-journals-10005-1012. Epub 2009 Dec 26. PMID: 25206116; PMCID: PMC4086572.

Testing Of Spit Downunder

So the science of spit is crucial in discovering gum disease. The screening of oral pH and for pathogenic bacteria is available in Australian cities now. Your pH balance inside your mouth determines what bacteria thrives there. Too low pH and the harmful bacteria which leads to tooth decay occurs. This is why oral hygiene is important, as to whether you can avoid cavities and gum disease. Opportunistic pathogenic bacteria will, when the oral microbiome enters dysbiosis, lead to negative outcomes like gingivitis, periodontitis, and caries. One Melbourne based testing service quotes at $249 for an oral microbiome test. Is this going to be the future of health?

Saliva testing for preventative oral health may well be the way of the future.

“Saliva-based periodontitis diagnostic tests are now technically possible, according to recent advancements in point-of-care (POC) testing. There have been reports of a variety of promising salivary biomarkers linked to periodontitis. Based on the etiology of periodontitis, a panel of ideal biomarkers needs to be carefully chosen. The procedure for validating periodontitis POC diagnosis in a wide, heterogeneous patient group may present the most significant challenge.”
– NCBI.gov

Spit Testing & The Future Of Dentistry

In the short to medium term, most dental clinics would be in favour of more Australians submitting themselves for saliva-based testing, as it may well encourage them to visit their dentist for more regular check-ups. However, in the long term, as we all become more used to screening our spit as a preventative early warning measure this proclivity may lead to a decrease in the traditional work for dentists. AI is not the only progressive technology coming for the jobs of dental practitioners, it seems. The future may well be a place where caries and gum disease are all but distant memories of an orally healthy populace. Gleaming white teeth in perfect smiles may surround us all as the normative state in which we live. The drilling type dentistry may fade into museum pieces, where school children on excursion line up around such displays and point and laugh at such old fashioned primitive behaviour. Grandparents might tell horror stories about early dentistry to tittering grandkids who cannot really believe that such grim stuff went on back in the day. Pull the other one Grandad!

“Currently, salivary testing does not predict future disease, does not predict the outcome of treatment, and does not change the treatment available/recommended. If there are significant advances in research, it is possible that in the future salivary testing may be useful as new ways of treating gum disease are discovered by researchers. The findings of research like this would be reviewed by the EFP/expert groups before recommendations can be made.”
– Bsperio.org.uk

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