Dentists Could Soon Diagnose Cancer By Looking At Your Saliva
Dentist Is The New Doctor U.S. NavyNew tools that extract disease biomarkers from saliva could make your dentist your first line of diagnostic defense. Your dentist could soon be your new doctor. Don't cancel your annual physical just yet, but promising research coming out of UCLA's School of Dentistry suggests that salivary diagnostics--or "salivaomics"--could become a potent resource for early detection of a broad range of potential health problems like autoimmune diseases, diabetes and even life-threatening conditions like cancer. In a paper published in the Journal of the American Dental Association, UCLA researcher Dr. David Wong describes his research into the biological makeup of saliva and the various indicators of health that live there. Human saliva is made up of molecules, after all, and in those complex molecules doctors or dentists looking for the right things can find everything from proteins to DNA to RNA--or basically the entire genome and a...