Monitoring of Biomarkers by Portable Breath Gas Sensors: an Exploratory Study

Breath analysis is a non-invasive procedure to detect and monitor diseases and it is particularly attractive for patients who have to routinely check biomarkers, such as diabetics (blood glucose) or end-stage renal disease patients (creatinine). The proposed breath sensors analyse breath in real-time with on-line display of breath parameters, are portable, simple to operate, inexpensive and offer a sufficiently low limit of detection for the target breath markers, thus making them of high interest for daily clinical practice. Preliminary data in a small study with healthy subjects showed a high correlation between blood glucose levels and acetone.

The primary objective of this study is to correlate biomarkers (glucose level and creatinine, respectively) with the corresponding target breath components (acetone and NH3, respectively) detected by portable gas sensors in the general population. The secondary objectives of the study are to assess possible predictive models for biomarker estimations from the corresponding target breath component and predictive models to estimate abnormal biomarker concentrations.