SIGNIFICANCE OF SALIVARY PH IN PATIENTS WITH CHRONIC LIVER DISEASE WITH OR WITHOUT HCC

Abstract

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION S alivary diagnostics has been a main focus over the past decade as an excellent and efficient tool to diagnose and monitor many diseases, not only is it economically sound and least invasive but also has shown to be promising in many diseases. Salivary pH has received a lot of attention over the past years as a tool to measure andreflect tissue pH status. Studies and literature has shown tissue pH to be acidic in chronic diseases in general and malignancy in specific. Several studies have evaluated the changes in tissue pH and Tumor pH through direct invasive measurement and very few have embarked on measuring salivary pH in specific diseases. This study was conducted in Ain Shams University Hospital on three groups of 100 subjects each. A group of healthy control, a group of patients with cirrhosis and a group of HCC on top of cirrhosis. Salivary pH was in the acidic range in the cirrhotic and HCC group, with the HCC group being significantly lower than in the cirrhotic group. We analyzed and compared the salivary pH between the HCC group and cirrhotic group on the basis of their clinical stage using child pugh classification. In each class A, B and C,HCC came out to be more acidic than the cirrhotic group corresponding to each class. On analyzing corelations between pH and individual laboratory parameter, serum creatinine, INR, billirubin, Hb, MELD score and age. With the strongest corelation between serum creatinine, MELD and age. We concluded that slaivary pH could be used as a disease marker for chronic diseases specifically malignancy.