Volatile organic compound breath signatures of children with cystic fibrosis by real-time SESI-HRMS


Date

2020-01-13

Publication Type

Journal Article

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

Web of Science:
Scopus:
Altmetric

Data

Abstract

Early pulmonary infection and inflammation result in irreversible lung damage and are major contributors to cystic fibrosis (CF)-related morbidity. An easy to apply and noninvasive assessment for the timely detection of disease-associated complications would be of high value. We aimed to detect volatile organic compound (VOC) breath signatures of children with CF by real-time secondary electrospray ionisation high-resolution mass spectrometry (SESI-HRMS). A total of 101 children, aged 4–18 years (CF=52; healthy controls=49) and comparable for sex, body mass index and lung function were included in this prospective cross-sectional study. Exhaled air was analysed by a SESI-source linked to a high-resolution time-of-flight mass spectrometer. Mass spectra ranging from m/z 50 to 500 were recorded. Out of 3468 m/z features, 171 were significantly different in children with CF (false discovery rate adjusted p-value of 0.05). The predictive ability (CF versus healthy) was assessed by using a support-vector machine classifier and showed an average accuracy (repeated cross-validation) of 72.1% (sensitivity of 77.2% and specificity of 67.7%). This is the first study to assess entire breath profiles of children with SESI-HRMS and to extract sets of VOCs that are associated with CF. We have detected a large set of exhaled molecules that are potentially related to CF, indicating that the molecular breath of children with CF is diverse and informative.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

Volume

6 (1)

Pages / Article No.

Publisher

European Respiratory Society

Event

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Organisational unit

03430 - Zenobi, Renato / Zenobi, Renato check_circle

Notes

This work is part of the Zürich Exhalomics project under the umbrella of “Hochschulmedizin Zürich”

Funding

Related publications and datasets