Role of salivary biomarkers in diagnosis of oral epithelial dysplasia :A systematic review

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Early detection of premalignant oral lesions, especially in high-risk patients, is important to prevent mortality. Dysplastic changes are one of the elements of premalignant lesions which can be perceived in histopathologic examinations. Use of Saliva is a promising method for diagnosing epithelial dysplasia because it is non-invasive and easy to collect. This review evaluates the salivary biomarkers in patients with oral epithelial dysplasia. METHODS: In this systematic review study, all English articles were searched in the PubMed, Cochrane library, web of science and Scopus databases until February 2021. The searches were done using the Medical Subject Heading (MESH) terms and free keywords. Textual data were analyzed manually and significant differences in salivary levels of biomarkers between patients with dysplastic lesions and healthy controls were reported and analyzed. RESULTS: Originally, 1726 articles were found, of which 17 case-control articles were selected according to the inclusion/exclusion criteria. In 85% of studies, proinflammatory cytokine levels were significantly increased in the groups with epithelial dysplasia compared to the control groups. Salivary levels of 14 types of micro-RNA were studied, the most important of which were micro-RNA 21 and 31, which showed a significant increase in the epithelial dysplasia groups compared to the control groups. CONCLUSION: With the advent of new and more sensitive techniques with standard methods and reference values, salivary diagnostics in the near future will become the technique of choice in early detection of oral epithelial dysplasia.