Salivary biomarkers of oxidative stress: A critical review

Human saliva is an increasingly attractive medium for biomarker discovery due to its amenability to noninvasive and repeated sampling, ease of collection and processing, and suitability for single analyte or metabolomic measurements. Salivary biomarkers of oxidative stress reflect local and systemic pathologies and may inform on the diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic responsiveness of numerous human diseases. However, for many of the disorders investigated, data reporting on alterations in salivary reflux homeostasis are often highly conflicted across studies. We surveyed the available biomedical literature on this topic and noted significant discrepancies in the study designs, targets populations, and operating procedures which likely contribute to the discordant data sets reported. Based on these observations, guidelines are provided to minimize interlaboratory variability in reflux biomarker discovery based on human saliva. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.