Electronic Nose for Diagnosis of Neurodegenerative Diseases Via Breath Samples

The diagnosis of neurodegenerative conditions and ADHD still mostly relies on clinical symptoms as there are no validated, inexpensive, and simple bio- markers available yet. The purpose of this study is to deliver a proof-of-concept for novel biomarkers to identify neurodegenerative conditions and ADHD based on breath testing.

Alveolar breath will be collected from healthy volunteers, patients with extrapyramidal conditions, patients diagnosed with dementia and from ADHD subjects. The discriminative power of a tailor-made Nanoscale Artificial Nose (™NA-NOSE) containing an array of six nanomaterial-based sensors will be tested. Discriminant factor analysis will be applied to the NA-NOSE signals in order to detect statistically significant differences between the sub-populations, and classification success will be estimated using leave-one-out cross-validation. The identification of NA-NOSE patterns will be supported by analyzing the chemical composition of the breath using gas-chromatography in conjunction with mass-spectrometry (GC-MS).