Salivary diagnostics: opportunities and challenges
Li et al.
The finding, in our words
Salivary diagnostics offer a non-invasive alternative to blood and urine testing for population screening and infectious disease surveillance, with wearable oral devices representing an emerging platform. However, clinical implementation requires standardisation of collection, processing and biomarker detection to overcome current reliability challenges.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
This review establishes that microsampling across blood, saliva, urine and stool matrices offers validated workflows and regulatory recognition for human biomonitoring comparable to conventional methods. It finds that these decentralised approaches enhance participant acceptability and enable screening in remote or low-resource settings.
This narrative review finds that saliva is best suited to repeated neuroendocrine and metabolic measurements during exercise, sweat is most mature for electrolyte and sweat-rate monitoring with wearable compatibility, and exhaled breath offers access to volatile metabolism but remains instrumentally demanding. Each matrix requires matching to a defined clinical or exercise question with matrix-specific validation before translational use.
Wearable biochemical monitoring requires a complete measurement chain that integrates quality-controlled biofluid sampling, sensor fusion and metadata capture to convert raw sensor outputs into clinically valid digital biomarkers.
This review assesses wearable sensors for the continuous biochemical monitoring of body fluids such as sweat, saliva and interstitial fluid, confirming their potential for decentralised healthcare through pilot trials. It emphasises that successful clinical translation depends on large-scale validation and the integration of ethical and sociocultural considerations.
Noninvasive salivary measurements of creatinine, cystatin C and urea, and fingerstick capillary blood testing, can approximate gold‑standard laboratory results for kidney function. This could enable more frequent, home‑based monitoring to detect CKD progression and AKI episodes without the burdens of conventional venepuncture and laboratory processing.
Beshay et al., Current opinion in nephrology and hypertension (paywalled) · source ↗