ArticleTuberculosis (Edinburgh, Scotland)2024
Detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex in saliva by quantitative PCR: A potential alternative specimen for pulmonary tuberculosis diagnosis.
Article in Tuberculosis (Edinburgh, Scotland), 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Diagnostic Accuracy of Molecular Testing on Saliva and Oral Swabs for Pulmonary Tuberculosis.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2026Article
- Extraoral Detection of Biomarkers and Pathogens in Saliva: Comprehensive, Panoramic Review.Biosensors · 2026Review
- Salivary exosomalFrontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2026Article
- PlasmaInfectious diseases (London, England) · 2025Article
- Simplified Co-extraction of total Nucleic Acids from Respiratory Samples for detection ofmedRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundCurrent tuberculosis (TB) diagnostic tests primarily rely on sputum samples, yet many TB patients cannot produce sputum. This study explored whether saliva could be used instead of sputum to diagnose pulmonary TB (PTB).
methodThe study included 32 patients with confirmed PTB and 30 patients with other respiratory diseases (ORD). Saliva from all study participants was subjected to quantitative (qPCR) assays targeting the IS1081 gene for detection of M. tuberculosis complex DNA.
resultsThe sensitivity of saliva IS1081 qPCR was 65.6 % (95 % CI 48.4-80.2 %) with positive results for 21/32 PTB cases, while the specificity was 96.7 % (95 % CI 85.9-99.6 %) with negative results for 29/30 participants with ORD. Sensitivity improved to 72.4 % (95 % CI 54.6-86.0 %) when sputum-Xpert was used as the reference standard, while remaining similar at 65.5 % (95 % CI 47.4-80.7 %) when culture was used as the reference standard. In receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis, the area under the curve (AUC) for saliva IS1081 qPCR was 82.5 % (95 % CI 71.7-93.3 %).
conclusionSaliva testing offers a promising alternative to sputum for TB diagnosis among confirmed PTB cases. Larger multicenter studies, encompassing diverse clinical TB characteristics, are needed to provide improved estimates of diagnostic sensitivity and specificity.
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