Abstract
Objectives: It has been suggested that exhaled breath contains relevant information on health status. We hypothesized that the real-time mass spectrometric analysis of breath may be useful to differentiate breathprints from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients and controls.
Methods: We studied 61 participants: 25 COPD patients (GOLD I-IV), 25 non-smoking controls and 11 smoking controls. We analyzed their breath by mass spectrometry in real time. Raw mass spectra were post-processed and statistically analyzed.
Results: Four groups comprising COPD (GOLD I-II), COPD (GOLD III-IV), smoking controls and non-smoking controls were correctly classified as a result of principal component analysis/canonical analysis. The most significant features rendering the separation of the different groups were identified. A blind classification (i.e. leave-one-out cross validation) resulted in 92% sensitivity-73% specificity (COPD vs. smoking controls); and 84% sensitivity-88% specificity (COPD vs. non-smoking controls).
Conclusions: We conclude that real time mass spectrometry may be a useful technique to analyze and characterize the metabolome of exhaled breath. The acquisition of breathprints in a rapid fashion may be a valuable tool to diagnose and phenotype COPD.
- © 2013 ERS