Unappreciated bodily fluid is becoming an effective instrument for study, diagnosis, and wellness. It turns out that saliva is full of interesting information.
Researchers at the Center for Interdisciplinary Salivary Bioscience Research at Johns Hopkins University claim that saliva contains a “treasure mine” of information that is simple to gather and affordable to analyze. It may reveal hidden aspects of human biology and genetics while also assisting in the fight against illness. The center’s director, Doug Granger, stated that studying saliva had a lot of potential.
What can Saliva do for you?
One-third of heart attack patients pass away before realizing they had excessive cholesterol, high blood pressure, or another risk factor for cardiac arrest. This is partial because most individuals don’t take the blood test as frequently as they ought to because it’s uncomfortable, time-consuming, and requires a clinic visit to be completed.
The usual blood test has now been recommended to be replaced with a saliva test in recent research by Granger and his coworkers. The spit can serve as a rough proxy for a patient’s heart health since it includes the same protein, known as C-reactive protein, that when discovered in blood at excessive levels implies a risk of heart disease. the moment a saliva test is accessible, “The test would be accepted by more individuals. It might be carried out more frequently, even in their homes, “According to Granger’s news statement.
The daughter of your father
According to research, girls who have good ties with their fathers hit puberty later, put off dating and having sex longer, and are more likely to remain in monogamous partnerships. Yet why? The solution could be swimming in spit, according to Granger and his team’s most recent research.
Researchers discovered that a girl’s saliva displays lower-than-normal amounts of the stress hormone cortisol in the morning and increased cortisol levels while she is talking about her troubles or fears with friends when her father-daughter relationship is marked by rejection, disorder, and compulsion. These unbalanced levels signify emotional sensitivity to stress, a characteristic that might have a detrimental impact on stress management and life decisions.
Indications of stress in the saliva
Stress sets off the body’s fight-or-flight reaction, which results in a surge of adrenaline, an elevated heart rate, and increased salivation, among other symptoms. Salivary alpha-amylase (sAA), which is produced by the salivary glands and floods the mouth, can be used as a stress indicator.
The health of a pregnant woman’s fetus might be impacted by stress or emotional trauma. The Johns Hopkins team has created a way to monitor sAA levels in a mother’s saliva to determine the effect of her stress on her unborn child.
They laid the framework for future research into the impact of exceptionally high-stress levels on newborns by identifying how sAA levels naturally change throughout pregnancy and the pattern by which they vary throughout the day in a study published in February.
Exposed spittle
Pre-mastication, the technique of pre-chewing adult food before feeding it to a newborn, was popular among our blender-less ancestors and is still practiced in many societies today. Thanks to research showing that a mother’s saliva helps strengthen her infant’s immune system, it may now be making a comeback in the West as well.
Pre-mastication ramps up newborns’ antibody production by exposing them to disease pathogens found in a mother’s spit, training their immune systems on how to combat such pathogens later in life.
It could also lower their chance of developing autoimmune disorders like asthma, which are widespread in industrialized nations and may be caused by inadequate pathogen exposure before age 2.
Spit provides kids a taste of pathogens while typically protecting them from becoming sick since it is swimming with antibodies that lessen the infectiousness of the germs in its midst.
DNA imprint
Your full genetic code is present in your spit, and it is in a form that may be more versatile than DNA obtained through other techniques. A “decent sample of DNA” may be obtained from one-half of an eyedropper drop of spit, according to Granger. “Multiple freeze-thaw cycles are possible with samples. We can extract both high-quality and large amounts of DNA from them, and they can be distributed over the mail.”