Salivary Fingerprinting of Periodontal Disease by Infrared-ATR Spectroscopy.

PURPOSE: Periodontal diseases, the most common chronic inflammatory diseases in humans, do not only affect tooth-supporting tissues but also other body parts by contributing to the development of life-threatening conditions. Since currently available diagnostic methods in periodontics lack the ability to identify patients at high risk for periodontal disease progression, development of innovative, non-invasive, rapid detection methods for diagnosing periodontal diseases is needed. This study aims to assess the potential of infrared attenuated total reflection (IR-ATR) spectroscopy to detect differences in composition of saliva supernatant in non-periodontitis individuals (control) and patients with generalized aggressive periodontitis (G-AgP). EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: IR-ATR is performed with a wavelength interval from 1230 to 1180 cm(-1) , analyzed with a simple subtraction in absorbance data. RESULTS: Ten samples show in the analysis of variance of the two data sets a true difference (99.8%). A principal component analysis (PCA) is able to discriminate between G-AgP and control groups. CONCLUSION AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE: This study demonstrates for the first time that IR-ATR spectroscopy is a promising tool for the analysis of saliva supernatant for the diagnosis of periodontitis, and potentially other periodontal conditions. IR-ATR spectroscopy holds the potential to be miniaturized and utilized as a non-invasive screening test.