Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
It’s amazing how our breath says a lot about our health. In particular, exhaled air, which contains Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), can reveal a lot about your general health. Depending on how metabolism or certain organ’s function, the composition of the exhaled air changes.
To illustrate this more clearly, think of our body like a car engine. We breathe in air, process it to keep things running, and then breathe out what’s left, like a car releasing exhaust gases. Roughly speaking,Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are just some of the waste products of metabolism.
We breathe an average of 20,000 times a day and there is a lot of information in these breathing rhythms. With every breath, around 3,000 different VOCs are exhaled in different concentrations and variations, such as hydrogen, carbon monoxide and acetone. Scientifically speaking, VOC profiles of healthy subjects are compared with VOC profiles of people with certain diagnosed diseases. When analyzed, VOC profiles were found to be similar within certain disease-affected populations.
Surprisingly, this is not new information!
If you look back into the history of disease diagnosis, you will find records of how doctors in ancient Greece recognized certain diseases by the smell of exhaled air. In addition, Pauling and Robinson et al presented a method in their 1971 study that enables the quantitative determination of 250 substances in a breath sample. Nevertheless, to date the potential of breathing gas analysis has not yet been exploited in the slightest from a technical point of view.
Now imagine an “e-nose” that “sniffs out” diseases early on. That’s the main subject of our studies and product development at VitaScale.
There are trained dogs that can detect certain diseases such as skin, prostate, and lung cancer, or diabetes using stool, urine, and breath samples. With their sensitive noses and acute senses, dogs can detect subtle differences in odor. How advantageous would it be if this could also be done electronically?
An “e-nose,” so to speak, with which diseases related to metabolism, fat burning, lung function, and digestive tract function can be detected at an early stage through altered components in exhaled air—without needles, quickly and easily. We want to classify the multitude of VOCs through pattern recognition and artificial intelligence in such a way that we can detect diseases non-invasively.
Some diseases are characterized by specific patterns in VOC profiles. For example, acetone levels in breath can be used to assess diabetes status. If there is elevated acetone in exhaled air, this is usually due to increased ketosis—a sign of diabetes. Typically, healthy individuals have baseline acetone levels of 1 to 2 ppm in their breath. People with diabetes may have baseline levels of 75 to 1,250 ppm during diabetic ketoacidosis.
VitaScale & VOCs: Detecting diseases earlier
We have been moving toward diagnostics and disease prevention. Our devices, vitashape and vitapace, are equipped with several different sensors. We want to enhance holistic information and enable better, differentiated analysis through the simultaneous measurement of a large number of VOCs in exhaled breath. This opens up completely new possibilities in disease diagnosis and early detection.
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Author: Lisa Schräder
Translation: Bruna Rocha
Sources:
Anderson Joseph C.: Measuring breath acetone for monitoring fat loss: Review (2015), URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4737348/ (Stand: 31.12.2023).
Pauling L., Robinson A.B., Teranishi R. & Cary P.: Quantitative analysis of urine vapor and breath by gas-liquid partition chromatography (1971), URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC389425/ (Stand: 31.12.2023).
Pereira J., Porto-Figueira P., Cavaco C., Taunk K,. et al: Breath Analysis as a Potential and Non-Invasive Frontier in Disease Diagnosis: An Overview (2015), URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4381289/#B18-metabolites-05-00003 (Stand: 31.12.23).
Pleil J.D., Stiegel M.A. & Risby T.H.: Clinical breath analysis: Discriminating between human endogenous compounds and exogenous (environmental) chemical confounders. Journal of Breath Research, Vol.7, No. 1, 2013.