Kallikrein and kininase activities in whole saliva from patients with periodontal disease (author's transl)

Abstract

The kinins, a group of biologically active polypeptides, are generally considered as important chemical mediators in the inflammatory process. However, the role of these mediators in periodontal disease still remains unknown.To make these points clear, the present study was performed to measure kallikrein and bradykininase activities in whole saliva from patients with periodontal desease, and to correlate these data with various clinical conditions such as GI-score, OHI-score, Pocket depth and Bone loss score.The kallikrein activity in the samples was measured by colorimetric method of Moriya et al. and fluorometric method of Matsuda et al., Both methods were compared to find out the better way for the mesurement of kallikrein activity.The bradykininase activity in the samples was assayed by the biological method of Takeya et al., The enzyme activity was expressed as the percentage of inactivation of bradykinin.The following results were obtained:1. Kallikrein was measured in the range from 10 to 40μg/ml by colorimetric method, however, much lower amount of kallikrein, 0.5 to 12μg/ml, could be detected by fluorometric method.2. Statistically significant positive correlations were found between kallikrein activity and all the clinical conditions examined (p<0.001).3. Statistically significant negative correlations were obtaind between bradykininase activity and all the clinical conditions examined (-p<0.001), and also between kallikrein activity and bradykininase activity (-p<0.001).4. The kallikrein activities in the saliva increased following the progress of periodontal disease, but the bradykininase activities remarkably decreased.