340: What Saliva Testing Can Tell Us About Athletes

Why saliva then? What, what, what was the decision behind that? What does saliva tell us, um, and what properties does it contain that could give us a, a greater understanding of what's happening inside an athlete's body?

Yeah.

So, so maybe we need to understand what saliva is or how we can frame it.

So, um, saliva is sometimes also described as being like an ultrafiltrate of blood, so it's basically filtered blood, which, um, leads to the-- leads to, to saliva having a big overlap in biomarkers compared to blood.

But on the other hand, it's very challenging matrix.

So the concentrations in saliva are very low, so this is also why it's so hard to analyze it.

Um, but at the end of the day, it's the only matrix that's, um, really accessible if you want to test in high frequency, and this is what we're doing.

So for us, it's, uh, not about one biomarker, it's about many biomarkers describing potentially internal load like a multi-organ system.

Um, so we have biomarkers, uh, covering sleep, psychological stress, immunological biomarkers, inflammation, hydration, all kind of different things.

So we try to make sense out of it, and, uh, we need to do this in a high-frequency setting.

So testing as, as much as possible, as often as possible, but in a high depth, so you can really understand what's going on, trends, patterns, things like this.

So we're not even competing with point-of-care products at, at this stage because there's usually about like one or two biomarkers which you can access like in a very short period of time.

I mean, we're still fairly fast with the depth we are providing, but for us it's more about trends and, and chronics issue we try to uncover.

Now, traditionally of course, blood testing has been the way that sports science has, has measured these, these biomarkers.

Does saliva in itself tell us more? Does it tell us different things, different information, or do you see it as sitting nicely alongside blood testing?

It really depends on the biomarkers, to be honest, right? So, so sometimes it can tell you the same thing, sometimes it's a different thing.

I give you a, I give you a very, um, nice, nice example here.

So hormones, right? So if, if you assess hormones in blood, you usually get a total hormone level back.

So let's say total testosterone levels.

So all the testosterone in, in, in your blood which is also bound to proteins, for example.

Um, but when we test hormones in saliva, we only assess or access the bioavailable, bioavailable part of the hormones.

Which is, which is, um, theoretically a bit more useful because you can basically see what's like actually active in your body, uh, from a concentration perspective when it comes to hormones.

So in this case, it's kinda similar, but it tells a bit different story.

Although you can access this also through blood, but it's a lot more expensive and tedious to do it.

So really depends.