It sounds like a quick-fix test, but it actually works.
Researchers have found that your spit can help you figure out how close you are to death.
The study was done on 635 adults from the years of 1995 to 2014. They found something in common with all of the saliva tests which led them to believe that saliva is a pretty accurate predictor of mortality.
There’s an antibody in the tongue, called secretory immunoglobin A, which can be a sign of mortality risk.
They found that the closer people were to death, the less of these antibodies they had.
Dr. Anna Phillips of the University of Birmingham is one of the lead authors of this study. She said, “There are now a number of factors that can affect how well we produce antibodies and maintain their levels.
“There are some that we have no control over, such as age, heritability of illness, but our general state of health can also affect their levels; stress, diet, exercise, alcohol, and smoking can all influence those levels.”
Now, they hope this new way of measuring antibodies in saliva can help in detecting mortality risk earlier.
Of course, the study was pretty small, so the next step would be to study this effect more widely. They’d like to investigate the link between antibodies and infectious disease, as well as diseases like cancer.
Now, they hope that this testing method could be a much less invasive way of testing mortality risk than something like blood sampling.
“We could certainly say that, if found to be extremely low, it could be a useful early indicator of risk.”
