Breath Test May Help Diagnose Irritable Bowel Syndrome

There is currently no specific diagnostic & monitoring test for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and no potentially reliable biomarkers have been identified until now. Using a novel metabolomic approach, researchers have identified a combination of substances in the breath that, when measured together, accurately distinguished IBS patients from people without the condition.

In a case-control study, a team of investigators, led by senior author Prof. Frederik-Jan van Schooten, Maastricht University Medical Centre (MUMC+; Maastricht, The Netherlands), analyzed a set of 16 volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in breath samples from a clinical cohort of 170 IBS patients and 153 healthy controls. The potential diagnostic VOC-biomarker set was then also tested on a cohort of 1307 participants from the general population.

The VOCs set correctly predicted 89.4% of the IBS patients and 73.3% of the healthy controls. Furthermore, the results of the breath test were particularly abnormal when patients' intestinal symptoms were most severe.

The study identified a set of 16 breath-based biomarkers for IBS. The VOC-biomarker set correlated significantly with GI symptoms and demonstrated the potential use of breath analysis in the diagnosis and monitoring of IBS, and a possible application of VOC analyses for screening the general or at-risk population.

"Now we know which chemicals in breath have diagnostic information that we can use to develop noninvasive tools to follow the disease and to steer therapeutic interventions," said senior author Prof. van Schooten, "This will definitely make a difference in quality of life for patients suffering from this functional gastrointestinal disorder."

The study, by Baranska A et al, was published May 2, 2016, in the journal Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

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Maastricht University Medical Centre