Diagnostic Applications of Saliva

Early diagnosis represents the target of contemporary medicine and has an important role in the prognosis and further treatment. Saliva is a biofluid that generated a high interest among researchers due to its multiple advantages over other body fluids. Saliva as a diagnostic tool can bring substantial addition to the diagnostic armamentarium providing important information about oral and general health.It is expected that in the future specific guidelines and results regarding the salivary diagnostics are to be available together with high-sensitivity and specificity tests for multiple systemic and oral diseases.However until saliva becomes a certified diagnostic test that can replace the conventional ones all the research values must be compared with the existing accepted methods. The degree of the success of saliva as a diagnostic aid is likely to depend on the introduction of mobile diagnostic devices that have the capacity to measure multiple analytes in a rapid cost-effective manner. With many such technologies currently under development the future of salivary diagnostics is looking very bright.