Saliva testing--a nontraditional diagnostic tool.
OBJECTIVE
To demonstrate the advantages of saliva testing over more common methods of determining concentrations of hormones, drugs, and viral antibodies in blood.


METHODS
Recent professional journals, product literature, bibliographies, and conference proceedings.


METHODS
Not applicable.


METHODS
Survey of literature.


RESULTS
In the past 10 years, saliva has been used increasingly to determine concentrations of steroid hormones, HIV antibodies, drugs of abuse, and therapeutic drugs in blood.  Benefits of using saliva rather than blood or urine for diagnostic testing include convenience and economy of specimen collection, ease of multiple sampling, and low risk of exposing laboratorians to hazardous samples.


CONCLUSIONS
Saliva testing is possible with currently available laboratory technologies.  If benefits of saliva testing are to be fully realized, laboratorians must provide physicians with data showing correlations of analyte concentrations in saliva, blood, and urine.
Miller
S M
SM
College of Professional Studies, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb  60115.
D019411:Clinical Laboratory Techniques; D006801:Humans; D012463:Saliva / Q000737:chemistry*; D013048:Specimen Handling; D015813:Substance Abuse Detection / Q000379:methods