The assessment of gustatory sensibility to salt is applied both in healthcare and in sensory analysis in the area of Food Science and Technology, to evaluate the taste and identify several origins of ageusia and hypogeusia, and notably to identify individuals at risk or who present a high salt intake. The adoption of an accurate and reproducible method to evaluate the taste threshold for salt would contribute to its widespread use. This integrative review aims to describe the methodologies employed to assess the detection threshold and recognition of sodium chloride. The databases used were CINAHAL, LILACS and MEDLINE and the keywords: taste threshold, sodium chloride and salt. Twenty-seven articles from 1985 to 2009 were identified and 29 tests were used to analyze the threshold. The majority of the articles used stimulation of the whole mouth (75.9%), followed by topical application on the tongue (24.1%), applying the solution to parts of the tongue (10.3%), electrogustometry (6.4%), impregnated disc (3.4%) and vacuum application (3.4%). There was considerable variability in the methodological procedures and important information was missing in some of them. The articles did not present the basis for the sample size, and the selection criteria for the panellists were extremely varied. Thus reproducibility of the studies and comparison of the articles was difficult. Benchmarking between different methods of evaluation of the taste threshold for salt with respect to their reproducibility could provide benefit in the choice of the most appropriate method to be employed in research and clinical practice.
Taste threshold; taste perception; sodium chloride
