LOS ANGELES: It’s still very early, but scientists say a test based on a patient’s saliva might someday help detect Alzheimer’s disease.
“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,” study author Shraddha Sapkota, a neuroscience graduate student at the University of Alberta in Canada, said in a news release.
In the study, Sapkota’s team tested the saliva of 22 people with Alzheimer’s disease, 25 people with what’s known as mild cognitive impairment (a decline in memory and thinking that’s sometimes a precursor to dementia), as well as 35 people whose mental skills were normal for their age.
They found that the saliva of people with Alzheimer’s had different levels of certain substances compared to the saliva of healthy people or those with mild cognitive impairment.