As anyone who has been tested for COVID-19 knows, the procedure is not the most comfortable experience. A new clinical trial might have found a less painful alternative.
Nasopharyngeal swabs — long, medical-grade probes used to collect samples from deep in patients’ noses and throats — are the gold standard for COVID-19 diagnostic testing. But in addition to the discomfort, the drawbacks of these swabs are the chance of running out of them as well as the pressure on trained medical personnel needed to perform the tests.
“Saliva self-collection is simply easier and more comfortable than the alternative of NP swabs, which in addition to the discomfort also require a trained medical professional,” said corresponding author Ramy Arnaout, MD, DPhil, associate director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratories at BIDMC. “In addition to it being a more convenient method, our findings show saliva collection can also be just as effective — even in a real-world scenario in which there are no eating or drinking restrictions before the saliva is collected.”
For their study, the researchers obtained two samples — one via NP swab, the other saliva — from 385 patients at BIDMC.
Patients waiting in line for NP testing were given a sterile sample collection cup and asked to provide a 3 milliliter saliva sample. The samples were processed either untreated or treated with a preservative, and all samples were tested across two COVID-19 testing platforms.
They found virus particles remained stable in both treated and untreated saliva samples for at least 24 hours. In addition, results came back the same in 93% of cases.
“We have demonstrated that for practical purposes, saliva is comparable to NP swabs for COVID-19 testing in outpatient settings,” Arnaout said.
The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Microbiology Spectrum.
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