Saliva testing in the dental chair is poised to revolutionize patient care.
What if a simple saliva test could change your patients’ lives for the better? Pain-free, non-invasive saliva diagnostics can spot trouble before patients even know they are unwell.
Saliva is an essential biofluid, vital for swallowing, fighting oral infection, and protecting teeth. It can also be a window into current and future health. How? Saliva contains patient DNA, genetic information from bacteria and viruses, and biomarkers that can indicate oral and systemic conditions. Within the time it takes for a dental cleaning, practitioners will soon be able to provide patients with an accurate picture of their oral and overall health.
This article will look at the advantages of saliva testing in the dental chair, the data it can reveal, and how it can revolutionize dental diagnostics and treatment planning.
What are the advantages of saliva testing?
Although most people are familiar with the idea of saliva testing, it is an evolving science that can provide accurate insights into a patient’s oral and overall health. Researchers are developing ways to predict, detect, and monitor gum disease and oral cancers using saliva. Saliva tests have also been proposed or proven to indicate diseases such as prostate cancer, breast cancer, heart disease, diabetes, hepatitis C, Parkinson’s disease, and more.
Advances in AI and CRISPR-based technology are laying the foundation for highly sensitive, affordable saliva tests that deliver precise and rapid results. CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. To put it simply, Benjamin Wu, CSO and COO of the ADA Forsyth Institute, describes it as “… a tool that can look for very specific genetic instructions—like finding one sentence in a giant book.”
As saliva testing progresses, CRISPR can help deliver fast, accurate diagnostics within just 30 minutes, eliminating the need to wait days for results. For patients, this also means receiving important health feedback during their appointment, not after, to move any treatment planning forward.
How can saliva tests help optimize treatment?
If saliva tests are performed at every dental checkup, they can help catch health issues early, which can go a long way toward ensuring treatment plans are proactive, more effective, and even less invasive. For many diseases, early detection can also vastly improve patient longevity and survival rates. The simple act of having patients spit into a tube could soon provide fast, highly accurate oral and systemic diagnoses—all from a test administered by dental staff without any additional training. Since saliva testing is painless and doesn’t make patients wait days or weeks for results, it may be less stressful than blood tests. Patients may be more willing to get tested regularly, and, more importantly, not avoid being tested if they suspect something’s wrong.
Conclusion: Saliva testing can change the game for patient assessment and care
Dental professionals specialize in providing the highest quality care, including promoting disease prevention and early detection. Saliva diagnostics are well on their way to unlocking fast, convenient ways to protect patient health and deliver more personalized treatment, revolutionizing patient care from the dental chair.