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

• Published in: ERJ open research 2020-01, Vol.6 (1), p.171
• Main Authors: Weber, Ronja, Haas, Naemi, Baghdasaryan, Astghik, Bruderer, Tobias, Inci, Demet, Micic, Srdjan, Perkins, Nathan, Spinas, Renate, Zenobi, Renato, Moeller, Alexander
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Original
• ISSN: 2312-0541; 2312-0541
• DOI: 10.1183/23120541.00171-2019

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 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.