Abstract
Although oral cancer is relatively rare in Japan among developed countries, incidence is increasing. Therefore, there is a pressing need to develop test methods for early detection of oral cancer and to establish medical checkup systems. This study involved working with regional dental associations and performing group medical checkups for cancer for early discovery. However, there is a limit to possible regions, periods and number of people for group checkups. Checkups can be performed for only a few groups, so instead, personal medical checkups should be performed more widely in dental clinics. However, there is currently no reliable screening or inspection method that public dental clinics can easily use.
Recent research has shown that saliva has several functions to maintain and promote health, and contains biological information related to the blood and urine. Saliva can easily be collected noninvasively at any place and many times without pain. Unlike blood, saliva rarely has cell components such as erythrocytes, leukocytes and platelets, and never solidifies. Therefore, specialized toolkits can be made for the assay of abnormal proteins of targeted expression, perhaps enabling diagnosis to be made at the chair-side in dental clinics. The authors have focused on saliva which can easily be collected noninvasively many times, and have attempted to develop easy screening methods for the cancer using saliva as samples and to identify early diagnosis molecular markers by fully using proteomics analytic technology. This paper explains an outline.
