Within two
years, you may be able to go for a regular dental
visit, spit into a cup and, before your appointment
is over, find out from an analysis of your saliva
whether you’re at risk for oral cancer. Currently,
dentists have to do a thorough mouth exam to probe
for oral cancer, which will strike more than 28,000
Americans and kill more than 7,000.
Within a few
more years, you may be able, with a fancier spit
test, to find out if you’re at risk for a number of
other diseases as well, including breast cancer,
Type 2 diabetes, ovarian cancer, Alzheimer’s disease
and rheumatoid arthritis.
If you’re
among the avante garde, you might even have a tiny
chip implanted in your cheek to monitor proteins in
saliva such as CRP, a protein that is often linked
to an increased risk of heart disease. With constant
monitoring, the chip could sound an alarm – maybe a
beep, maybe an electronic message to your doctor –
whenever levels of a particular protein drift too
high or too low.
Until a few
years ago, the technology to analyze minute
quantities of genetic material and proteins in
saliva was simply not good enough for many of the
tests doctors want to do or tests consumers could do
in the privacy of their own homes, said Dr. David
Wong,, associate dean of research at the UCLA
School of Dentistry and co-director of head and neck
cancer research program at the Jonsson Cancer
Center at UCLA.
In the brave
new world of genomics and proteomics – the study of
genes and the proteins they make - the best body
fluid to analyze disease risk may soon be saliva,
not blood. Saliva, the slippery fluid that helps
moisten and digest food, is a medical goldmine
because it is almost identical to the clear part of
blood, but with everything, including infectious
organisms, present in weaker concentrations.
Saliva testing
is less invasive, less painful, less likely to cause
infection and potentially cheaper than blood testing
because there’s no need for a phlebotomist to draw
blood. And because it’s so easy to test saliva
repeatedly during the day, doctors believe they will
be able to use saliva-based tests to keep track of
real-time physiological changes such as how an
infection is responding to antibiotics.
The idea of
using saliva for detection is not new. Among ancient
peoples, legend has it that saliva was used as a
primitive lie detector test. A person accused of
wrongdoing would be given a handful of rice and told
to swallow it; if he couldn’t, it meant he was
dry-mouth, nervous and guilty.
Medically, researchers have long been
fascinated by what can be studied in saliva, and
there are already saliva-based tests on the market
to detect the presence of the AIDS virus, alcohol,
illicit drugs, the influenza virus, hormones that
signal premature labor or
Judy Foreman’s column appears every other week. Past
columns are available on
www.myhealthsense.com.
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