universidade de são paulo - Faculdade de Odontologia - Unesp

73
to the adsorption of salivary proteins [4, 17]. In spite of the importance of saliva
in the process of adhesion and colonization of microorganisms, the role it plays is
still not clear [37]. In this study, half the samples of each group were preconditioned
in saliva before the fungal adherence test. The results demonstrated
that the adhesion of Candida albicans to the surfaces was not influenced by the
saliva, under all the experimental conditions evaluated. A comparison between in
vitro studies revealed contradictory results [4]. While some authors observed that
the film of saliva promoted fungal colonization on the materials [5, 7, 26, 37-39],
others found that pre-treatment with saliva did not significantly affect [25, 40-43]
or diminish the adherence of Candida [8-10, 43-45). These divergent results could
be attributed to the different methodologies used in each study, including different
numbers of donors, the use of stimulated or unstimulated saliva, filtered or total
saliva, diluted or undiluted saliva, different centrifugation times and speeds, as
well as different incubation periods and temperatures. In the present investigation,
the saliva used was diluted with PBS, according to the methodology of Ramage et
al. [25], which could have contributed to the absence of the effect of preconditioning
on fungal adherence observed in the two studies.
In addition to the factors related to the saliva itself, the different results
found in the literature could also be related to the different materials evaluated in
the studies of Candida albicans adherence, such as resilient denture relining
materials [5, 9, 38, 39, 41, 45], maxillofacial polymeric materials [37], acrylic
surfaces [7-10,26, 37, 42-45], hydroxyapatite [7] and polystyrene [25, 40]. These
methodological variations make comparison between the studies difficult and