Abstract
Background
Early diagnosis of malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) can improve patients' outcome but is hampered by non-specific symptoms and investigations, which delay diagnosis and result in advanced stage disease. An accurate non-invasive test allowing early stage diagnosis in asbestos-exposed persons is currently lacking. Nevertheless, breathomics aims at a non-invasive analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in breath which can serve as new biomarkers.
Aim
We investigated which VOCs could play a role in MPM pathogenesis in order to build an early diagnostic tool by looking at the diagnostic accuracy.
Methods
Alveolar air was sampled from 10 MPM patients, 10 healthy asbestos-exposed individuals and 10 healthy non-exposed individuals after fasting for 2 hours by using the BioScout Multicapillary Column/Ion Mobility Spectrometer (MCC/IMS, B/S Analytik, Germany). VOCs were visually selected and their intensity (V) was compared between background and breath samples via on-board VisualNow software and SPSS v21 (IBM) using Mann-Whitney-U tests. MPM diagnostic accuracy was obtained by ROC-analysis.
Results
Out of 41 VOCs of interest, two show a significantly higher intensity in the exhaled breath of MPM patients compared to controls. The high AUCROC of VOCs P12 (0.865) and P24 (0.770) suggests a possible role of these associated VOCs in MPM pathogenesis and as a diagnostic marker in discriminating MPM patients from asbestos-exposed healthy controls.
Conclusion
Several VOCs of interest were seen in the breath of MPM patients. Two were significantly discriminating between all populations and could be used as diagnostic MPM markers. GC-MS analysis is on-going in order to identify these VOCs.
- © 2014 ERS