Drop Date: January 2026

If 2000 marked the year salivary bioscience entered its adolescence, then 2025 may well be remembered as the year it achieved adulthood. Today, the field has matured, and reviewers across disciplines recognize the assessment of salivary biomarkers as rigorous, reliable, and methodologically robust tools for answering complex research questions related to human behavior and health. Once considered a specialized niche tool for use in stress research, salivary bioscience is now routinely employed in studies published in high impact journals across psychology, medicine, public health, endocrinology, immunology, and developmental science.

Over the past year, this trend has continued. Investigators across many disciplines are adopting non-invasive, low-burden, and scalable saliva sampling methods, not simply for convenience, but because saliva offers something fundamentally valuable: the ability to capture dynamic physiology in real time, in naturalistic and meaningful environments, and in ways consistent with a participant’s lived experience. This trend is not just methodological, but also conceptual, and reflects a broader recognition that understanding human health and behavior requires the integration of biological assessment methods that preserve ecological validity.

This evolution also represents a second truth and one that is rooted in the pioneering work of Salimetrics’ founders who contributed to the development of the field. Salimetrics methods, assays, and collection tools were designed specifically by researchers to solve the scientific challenges they faced. That spirit of innovation is in our DNA. Today, the products and services developed by Salimetrics have led to more than 10,000 peer-reviewed publications.

If you look closely enough, you’ll notice another trend. Over the years, there has been an evolution such that Salimetrics tools are mainstays in high impact publications. It’s not surprising, really, because Salimetrics products and services are a trusted quality benchmark when it comes to the combination of analytical reproducibility and precision, operational reliability, and methodological rigor.

As we move forward and enter this next phase of scientific advancement, we wanted to pause and take a quick look back at some recent publications. Below we have selected 10 publications that illustrate this high-impact trend.

Notable Research (2024–2025)

Deep phenotyping of post-infectious myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome
Walitt et al., 2024, Nature
A lack of established diagnostic biomarkers presented a barrier to reliable case assessment of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Salivary cortisol enabled evidence of HPA-axis hyporesponsiveness, contributing to differential cardiorespiratory performance discoveries of participants.

Reproducible stability of verbal and spatial functions along the menstrual cycle
Pletzer et al., 2024, Neuropsychopharmacology
Salivary estradiol and progesterone measurements enabled researchers to capture cycle-specific hormonal fluctuations, facilitating reproducibility in cognitive endocrinology research.

Therapy Dogs for Anxiety in Children in the Emergency Department: A Randomized Clinical Trial | Emergency Medicine
Kelker et al., 2025, JAMA Network Open
Saliva analysis measured stress in pediatric patients to evaluate the use of therapy dog interventions for non-pharmacological anxiety reduction in emergency care settings.

The oral microbiome is associated with HPA axis response to a psychosocial stressor
Charalambous et al., 2024, Scientific Reports
Salivary cortisol facilitated measuring stress physiology alongside oral microbiome profiles, supporting a robust, multimodal assessment of HPA-axis dynamics.

A cluster-randomized trial of water, sanitation, handwashing and nutritional interventions on stress and epigenetic programming
Lin et al., 2024, Nature
Saliva was used to measure cortisol and alpha-amylase responses to stress, revealing that children receiving the combined nutrition, water, sanitation, and handwashing (N + WSH) showed healthier, more robust stress-response patterns than controls.

Affect variability and cortisol in context: The moderating roles of mean affect and stress
Niu et al., 2025, Psychoneuroendocrinology
Salivary cortisol sampling supporting tracking of physiological stress, supporting researchers to link daily affect variability and contextual stress to fluctuations in endocrine activity.

Childhood trauma cortisol and immune cell glucocorticoid transcript levels are associated with increased risk for suicidality in adolescence
Goltser-Dubner et al., 2025, Molecular Psychiatry
By measuring morning cortisol in saliva samples and related blood biomarkers, researchers assessed HPA-axis function and found that suicidal adolescents exhibited lower cortisol linked to childhood trauma and disrupted glucocorticoid-gene expression.

The salivary metabolome of children and parental caregivers in a large-scale family environment study
Rothman et al., 2024, Nature
Saliva was analyzed using untargeted metabolomics and key biomarker assays to characterize metabolic and inflammatory profiles across children and caregivers.

Group singing and its effect on cortisol, alpha amylase, oxytocin, and pain threshold in patients with Parkinson’s disease
Mallik et al., 2025, Frontiers In
Saliva was collected before and after each singing session to measure cortisol, alpha amylase, and oxytocin, enabling researchers to link biochemical shifts with meaningful increases in pain tolerance among individuals with Parkinson’s disease.

Body fluid biomarkers and psychosis risk in The Accelerating Medicines Partnership® Schizophrenia Program: design considerations
Perkins et al., 2025, Nature
Saliva measured cortisol and other bioactive molecules, enabling assessment of hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis function alongside blood-based biomarkers.

The pattern here is clear. Strong data leads to strong conclusions, and stronger conclusions translate directly into publications with greater impact.

Salimetrics is committed to supporting research teams to pursue the highest-impact objectives. You’ve got this and we’re here to support your research whenever you need us. Still have questions? Contact Salimetrics anytime.