Prakash Chandra Karki, Seraj Ahmed Khan, Rajendra Kumar Chaudhari, Rajendra KC
ABSTRACT
Diabetes Mellitus is a chronic endocrine disease characterized by hyperglycemic state owing to insulin deficiency or its resistance. Its diagnosis and monitoring requires regular measurement of blood glucose level, which is very apprehensive and painful to the patients. Therefore it necessitates the need of less invasive body fluid like saliva, whose collection is easy, economical, and painless and doesn’t require expertise. Hence this study was carried out to correlate the fasting salivary glucose with fasting serum glucose and glycated hemoglobin in diabetes patients and compare it with healthy control and to substantiate the role of saliva as a diagnostic tool. This was a hospital based comparative cross sectional study. We included 50 newly diagnosed case of diabetes and 50 healthy age and sex matched control after taking their informed consent. Five ml fasting unstimulated saliva and 5 ml fasting blood was collected under standard conditions and the sample were processed immediately. Salivary and serum glucose was estimated by hexokinase method in autoanalyzer. Glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) was analyzed by turbidimetric inhibition immunoassay in autoanalyzer .The data were analyzed by Student’s t-test and Pearson’s correlation using SPSS version 16. The salivary glucose level was significantly higher in diabetic patients as compare to control (p<0.001). We also noticed a significant positive correlation between fasting salivary glucose and fasting serum glucose, (r=0.762, p<0.001) whereas correlation between fasting salivary glucose and glycated hemoglobin in diabetic patients was not significant(r=0.391, p=0.121).
Our finding suggests that the salivary glucose is directly correlated with serum glucose and the cutoff value set by Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve is ≥2.55 mg/dl for diabetic patients.
Keywords: Diabetes mellitus, fasting salivary glucose, fasting serum glucose.