The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology is reporting that an electronic device can sniff out people with asthma from those that are healthy.
An electronic nose senses volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in breath and exhaled breath contains thousands of VOCs. With pattern recognition, the electronic nose could be used to recognize the markers for asthma or other lung diseases in VOCs.
Dr. Peter J. Sterk from the Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands and colleagues tested the theory of the electronic nose and compared the exhaled breath of patients with a pre-diagnosis of asthma with that of healthy patients.
The study compared 10 young adults with mild asthma to 10 similar healthy people and 10 older adults with severe asthma were compared to 10 healthy adults. "Smellprints" of young patients with mild asthma were distinguished with 100 percent accuracy from those that where healthy and "smellprints" of patients with severe asthma were distinguished 90 percent of the time from their comparison subjects. The "smellprints" were less effective when used to detect mild from severe asthma.
"Our findings warrant further validation of electronic noses regarding their ability to correctly identify (new) patients with asthma. If successful, electronic noses have the potential to become convenient devices for physicians and nurses for handheld, noninvasive, and rapid diagnosis of asthma," Sterk and colleagues point out. "In addition, validation of electronic noses in other respiratory diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or lung cancer, seems to be mandatory."
[Source: PRNewsWire]
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