BIOCHEMICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SALIVA TO BE LINKED TO THE MULTIPLE CARIES IN CHILDREN

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Journal of the Korean Academy of Pediatric Dentistry 1998;25(4):691-703.
Published online November 30, 1998.

BIOCHEMICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SALIVA TO BE LINKED TO THE MULTIPLE CARIES IN CHILDREN

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Abstract

Saliva is obviously potential medium to protect the dental caries by not only physical clearing effect, but aggregating action of protein with bacteria. Nevertheless, we still do not understand how the dental caries occur and what brings the individual difference in caries prevalence. In the regards of dental caries prevalence, we hypothesized that the composition of salivary protein might be different from caries susceptible group to caries resistant group. The purposes of this experiment were focused on the molecular analysis of salivary proteins from the subjects who were involved in multiple caries. Electrophoretic analysis was done on the whole saliva collected from the children with and without multiple caries. We found 86.2% of subjects with multiple caries has approximately 120 KDa protein band while 30.4% in the healthy subjects. And the concentration of the total protein on the subjects with multiple caries is significantly higher than that of the healthy group. However, it turned out that the difference of the salivary composition does not affect the bacterial adhesion to hydroxyapatite bead. With regards of enzymes in saliva, the activity of α-amylase and lactate dehydrogenase does not have any significant difference between both groups. However, the concentrations of Na⁺ and Cl^- in saliva from multiple caries group is higher than that of the control group. Taken all together, it may be concluded that 120 KDa protein in saliva may be associated with the process of dental caries, also the high concentration of protein and Na⁺,Cl^- in saliva may be linked to dental caries development as a cofactors.

Key Words: multiple caries, salivary protein, saliva