Correlation of Serum and Salivary Lipids and their Degree of Accuracy among Apparently Healthy Primary School Children aged 5-12 Years in Sokoto, Nigeria

Correlation of serum and salivary lipids has been a recent topic to determine the relationship serum and salivary lipids share, though still at the rudimentary stage, in order to have a better understanding of their relationship, the degree of accuracy, as well a validity test, need to be simultaneously checked. These have not been tested especially in children, as it has been tested in adults in the underdeveloped world, like Nigeria and Africa as a whole. Few studies discussed this entity in children even in the developed world. Objectives: To determine the correlation of serum and salivary lipids and their degree of accuracy as well the validity of the test.Settings and Design: Descriptive and cross-sectional. Materials and Methods: A total of 200 apparently healthy primary school children aged 5-12 years, who had no medical complaints or any major medical condition. The parameters assessed included serum and salivary; total cholesterol (TC), triglycerides (TG), high-density lipoproteins (HDL), and low-density lipoproteins (LDL)Statistical Methods: Correlation and Regression analysis, Validity test, and Receiver Operator Curve (ROC) Results: there was a positive moderate correlation between serum and salivary lipids and for all lipid parameters tested statistically significant (p=<0.001) patterns were observed. Linear regression reveals a corresponding positive linear relationship i.e. the mean values of salivary lipids increases as that of the serum lipids increases. The validity test reveals a very good sensitivity for TC, TG, and LDL, but poor sensitivity for HDL. Specificity was very low for all the lipid parameters except for HDL (87.3%). Positive and negative predictive values had excellent sensitivity for TC, TG and LDL but very poor for HDL. Precision equally showed very good sensitivity for TC, TG, and LDL. The ROC revealed a positive deflection for all tested lipid panels. For TC, a good area under curve was observed at 0.825 as well TG at 0.835. A poor area under curve was observed for HDL at 0.304. and lastly, LDL showed a fair area under the curve at 0.734. Conclusion: Serum lipids correlates moderately with salivary lipids with a good degree of accuracy and can therefore replace the former in screening for lipid profile test and in diagnosing dyslipidaemia in children.