Why is my spit sticky
Spit! What your saliva says about you
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you
my name's Gordon Proctor and I direct
the mucosal and salivary research group
here at King's College London in the
dental Institute for a number of years
now I have been studying the function of
saliva and salary' glands and so today's
question is why study spit all of the
internal body surfaces are coated by a
fluid which helps to protect them and
prevent disease and saliva fulfills that
function for the mouth this fluid is
packed full of components which have a
antimicrobial function and can control
bacteria and other microorganisms that
are present in the mouth if there are
some diseases which cause a chronic loss
or change of the properties of saliva in
the mouth and not only can these affect
oral health they can also impact on
everyday activities that we take for
granted
for example tasting and swallowing food
or even speaking so we study saliva in
order to find out how we might replace
it if it's lost or enhance its functions
we study salary gland function in order
to determine how saliva is made some
patients with Sandra Glen disease have
the absence of saliva and by learning
how it's made we can determine how to
treat those glands and then bring back
the saliva that those patients have lost
a second part of our research on saliva
is concerned with what it tells us about
our health and how it might be used to
diagnose disease many components of
saliva are derived from the rest of the
body and not just salivary glands or the
oral tissues so like blood it can be
used to diagnose systemic disease we can
use saliva to determine whether
somebody's infected with HIV or
hepatitis in the future it's likely that
we will see the increased use of saliva
in diagnostic testing unlike blood it
doesn't require the use of a needle and
so it can be collected repeatedly and
easily from subjects recent research in
linguistics suggests that spit is one of
a few highly conserved words that was in
use 15,000 years ago so it would seem
that we've always been preoccupied with
spit and what it says about us
you
you
