TY - JOUR T1 - Volatile organic compounds as an early diagnostic tool for malignant pleural mesothelioma JF - European Respiratory Journal JO - Eur Respir J VL - 44 IS - Suppl 58 SP - 1700 AU - Kevin Lamote AU - Joris Van Cleemput AU - Kristiaan Nackaerts AU - Jan van Meerbeeck Y1 - 2014/09/01 UR - http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/44/Suppl_58/1700.abstract N2 - BackgroundEarly 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.AimWe investigated which VOCs could play a role in MPM pathogenesis in order to build an early diagnostic tool by looking at the diagnostic accuracy.MethodsAlveolar 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.ResultsOut 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.ConclusionSeveral 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. ER -