Health care education, delivery, and qualityAn electronic nose in the discrimination of patients with asthma and controls
Section snippets
Subjects
A total number of 40 subjects volunteered to participate to this study. All the subjects were nonsmoking adults (18-75 years) without any other acute or chronic disease than asthma. The study population included 4 groups of subjects based on current standard diagnostic procedures1: patients with intermittent-mild asthma and patients with moderate-severe persistent asthma, each with their own healthy control group. Patients were recruited among those visiting the outpatient clinic of the Leiden
Results
The subject characteristics of the 4 groups are described in Table I. Patients with severe asthma were older than patients with mild asthma (P < .01), which was the reason for using 2 control groups with ages below and above 45 years, respectively. Two samples of exhaled air could be obtained in all subjects.
First, we examined whether exhaled breath from patients with asthma could be discriminated from controls. The plots of the online PCA of the smellprints obtained from the first bags in the
Discussion
Our study shows that an electronic nose can discriminate exhaled breath of patients with asthma from healthy controls. This distinction was replicated when analyzing exhaled air from repeated samples. However, the electronic nose could not adequately discriminate mild from severe asthma. These findings indicate that the mixture of exhaled volatile organic compounds is different in asthma compared with controls. Our findings warrant further validation of electronic noses regarding their ability
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Supported by Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands, and the University of Bari, Italy.
Disclosure of potential conflict of interest: The authors have declared that they have no conflict of interest.