Effect of non-surgical periodontal therapy on salivary metabolic fingerprint of generalized chronic periodontitis using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy

Objective: Metabolomic analysis of saliva proved its accuracy in discriminating patients with generalized chronic periodontitis (GCP) from healthy subjects by identifying specific molecular signatures of the disease. There is lack of investigations concerning the effect of periodontal treatment on individual metabolic fingerprints. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine whether non-surgical periodontal therapy could change salivary metabolomic profile in GCP to one more similar to periodontal health.

Design: Unstimulated whole saliva of 32 controls and 19 GCP patients were obtained prior to and 3 months after conventional staged non-surgical periodontal therapy. Metabolic profiling was performed using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, followed by univariate and multivariate paired approaches to assess the changes introduced by the therapy.

Results: In GCP group, periodontal treatment led to an improvement in all clinical parameters (p < 0.001). The accuracy of the multivariate model in discriminating the metabolomic profile of each GCP patient at two time points was 92.5%. Despite the almost perfect separation of the spectra in the metabolic space, the univariate analysis failed to identify significant variations in single metabolite content. The post-treatment metabolic profile of GCP patients could not be assimilated to that of healthy controls who exhibited different levels of lactate, pyruvate, valine, proline, tyrosine, and formate.

Conclusions: Based on these data, NMR-spectroscopic analysis revealed that, despite significant changes in the overall metabolomic fingerprint after non-surgical therapy, GCP patients maintained a distinctive metabolic profile compared to healthy individuals.