Cholinergic components in human gingiva in healthy and inflamed states

Acetylcholine (ACh) and acetylcholinesterase (AChE) are main components in cholinergic nervous system. ACh is a natural constituent of many parts of the nervous system and its chief role is neurotransmission. It is not entirely unique in function to the cholinergic tissues of the human body. Gingiva is the part of the oral mucosa which contains numerous mast cells. They contain a variety of biologically active substances including neurotransmitters such as 5-hydroxytryptamine, histamine etc. In the dental literature accessible to authors no data were found on ACh and AChE in the different oral structures in health and inflamed conditions. Therefore gingiva samples from 50 human individuals representing varying grades of inflammatory involvement have been utilised in the present study. ACh and AChE were estimated in the gingiva tissues by flurometric and spectrophotometric methods. This study established hithero unknown "norms" for the ACh and AChE contents of the clinically normal gingiva, which are found to be 0.85 +/- 0.06(SE) ug/g and 210 +/- 18(SE) micromoles ACh hydrolysed/hr/gm/wet tissues. Results also revealed that the range of variations of ACh is high and AChE is low in all the inflamed states of gingival tissues.