Potential Saliva Test to Detect Alzheimer’s

Saliva may be a new, easily-accessible, avenue for Alzheimer’s detection.

A small study, presented at the 2015 [1] Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Washington, D.C this week, showed early, but intriguing results with implications for a simple diagnostic tool for Alzheimer’s – which is nothing to spit at.

Researchers used liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LCMS), to analyze metabolites in saliva of 35 people with what is considered normal aging, 25 with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and 22 with Alzheimer’s disease. The team successfully identified substances that differentiated among the three types of individuals and were able to predict biomarker-cognition associations. The study drew on data collected from the Victoria Longitudinal Study (VLS) a long-term, large scale investigation of human aging supported by the National Institute on Aging in Canada.

The team then linked the protein data analysis back to each participant’s clinical diagnosis (gathered from VLS), and reported strong associations between certain metabolites and performance on cognitive tests, according to a news release from the Alzheimer’s Association.

“Saliva is easily obtained, safe, and affordable, and has promising potential for predicting and tracking cognitive decline, but we’re in the very early stages of this work and much more research is needed,” Shraddha Sapkota, a neuroscience graduate student at the University of Alberta Canada, said in the release. “Equally important is the possibility of using saliva to find targets for treatment to address the metabolic component of Alzheimer’s, which is still not well understood. This study brings us closer to solving that mystery.”

Sapkota presented the study at the conference on Sunday.

Read More: New Compound Could Offer Therapy for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s [2]

Results of the analysis were validated through analysis of a new independent sample of 27 participants.

Average age of those with normal aging and MCI was about 70, while average age of those with Alzheimer’s was about 77.

Some experts caution that the results are early and the sample size is small, CNN reported [3].

Dr. Dean Sherzai, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Prevention Program at Cedars-Sinai told CNN, “It is extremely preliminary,” and said the sample is so small that the abnormalities could have been incidental. He noted the study has to be replicated in a larger population.

Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in America, affecting an estimated 5.3 million people.