In the past few years, technological advances have pushed the concept of salivary diagnostics for systemic disease to the forefront of scientific attention.
"David Wong and his team at the dental school have demonstrated the usefulness of saliva in detecting oral cancer," said co-first author James Farrell, M.D., an associate professor in the UCLA Division of Digestive Diseases and director of the Pancreatic Diseases Program at UCLA. "As a clinician-scientist who manages patients with all stages of pancreatic cancer, I was eager to work with them to explore the possibilities it could yield in diagnosing this disease."
In the study, the researchers successfully linked changes in the molecular signatures found in human saliva to the presence of early-stage pancreatic cancer.
By analyzing altered gene expression, the researchers identified four messenger RNA (mRNA) biomarkers KRAS, MBD3L2, ACRV1 and DPM1 that differentiate pancreatic cancer patients from non-cancer subjects (both those diagnosed with chronic pancreatitis and healthy controls) with 90 percent sensitivity and 95 percent specificity.
"Our recent findings underscore the potential for salivary diagnostics to play a pivotal role in the detection of systemic cancers and diseases," said Lei Zhang, Ph.D., an assistant researcher at the UCLA School of Dentistry Dental Research Institute and co-first author of the study.
"Not only are these saliva-based diagnostic methods for pancreatic cancer simple and noninvasive, they may also represent an improvement in specificity and sensitivity over currently used procedures, such as blood tests, for early pancreatic cancer detection," Farrell said.
Due to the study's modest sample
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| Contact: Sandra Shagat sshagat@dentistry.ucla.edu 310-206-0835 University of California - Los Angeles Source:Eurekalert |