Saliva as an Early Detection Tool for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Risk in Patients with Periodontitis

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (copd) is a serious respiratory disease that causes death. world health organi-zation (who) estimates that in 2020, copd is responsible the fourth cause of death worldwide. early detection of copd is important because of its progressive characteristic and difficulty in treatment. diagnosis of copd is based on positive results from expectorated sputum, but contamination by oropharyngeal bacteria would cause false negative results. over-coming this possible disadvantage of procedure would need alternative biological material for diagnosis. periodontitis has been known to be one of the risk factors of copd. periodontitis has been linked to the presence of porphorymonas gin-givalis, sialidase enzyme, and interleukin (il) 8 in the saliva. these markers have also been correlated copd, therefore saliva has potential use as biological material harboring the markers of copd in patients with periodontitis. this review focused on analysis of the potential use of saliva as an alternative biological material for early detection of copd in pa-tients with periodontitis. full range of information obtained from journals, textbooks and online scientific articles was obtained. saliva is suggested as promising biological material for early detection of copd in patients with periodontitis.