SUMMARY
In periodontology, clinical criteria are usually not sufficient to distinguish the presence of active disease, monitoring response to treatment, or assess disease progression. Studies have shown that resistin is involved in the etiology of periodontitis. The purpose of this paper was to assess the salivary resistin levels in patients with chronic periodontitis (CP). In this case-control study the saliva samples were collected from 45 patients with CP and 45 age- and sex-matched healthy individuals. Salivary resistin was determined by ELISA method. The results were analyzed by Mann-Whitney test. The software used in this study was SPSS 17. P value less than 0.05 was considered significant. In this study, the mean salivary resistin level was 0.769 (+0.396) ng/ml in the patients group and 0.145 (+0.068) ng/ml in the healthy group, with a significant difference (P <0.05). The results of this research showed that the salivary levels of resistin in patients with CP are higher than in healthy individuals and salivary resistin can be considered as a marker in the pathogenesis, early diagnosis and determination of the inflammatory status of CP.