Simple saliva test diagnoses asthma

Monday September 19th, 2016

A saliva test that can diagnose asthma has been developed by a team of UK researchers.

Researchers at Loughborough University, England, working with Nottingham City Hospital have developed a one-stop, painless test that is suitable for all ages.

The team, led by Professor Colin Creaser from the university’s Department of Chemistry and Dr Dominick Shaw from the Respiratory Research Unit at City Hospital, collected saliva from patients with asthma and healthy individuals and performed liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) analysis on the samples to find metabolic biomarkers.

Writing in Analytical Methods, the team also says it has the potential to identify the severity and progression of the disease.

“Unlike other sampling methods, such as expired breath analysis, saliva can be collected by passive drool from the very young to the very old without causing distress,” said Prof Creaser.

“We were therefore interested to know if techniques for metabolic profiling of saliva to identify physiological stress from exercise – developed by Loughborough – could be applied to asthma diagnosis. We were very excited to discover that they could.”

Further longitudinal studies need to be undertaken before the test can move to a clinical setting.

The researchers say that while usual practice is to measure a person’s airflow lung capacity, it is sometimes inaccurate. Other tests, such as blood, urine or sputum analysis can be upsetting for younger patients in particular.

Malkar A, Wilson E, Harrison T et al. Untargeted metabolic profiling of saliva by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry for the identification of potential diagnostic biomarkers of asthma. Anal. Methods 2016,8, 5407-5413 DOI: 10.1039/C6AY00938G [abstract]

Tags: Allergies & Asthma | Respiratory | UK News

Printer friendly page