Exhaled air analysis as a potential fast method for early diagnosis of dengue disease

Abstract

Dengue is a neglected tropical disease caused by arbovirus. Every year 390 million persons are infected with dengue, of which 96 million manifest clinically around the world, mainly in the Latin America, South-East Asia and Western Pacific. The disease manifests itself as a flu-like infection that generally is difficult to recognise from a normal flu or other viral infections. The mortality rate is around 20 % for the severe form of dengue, which readily could be decreased to below 1% with early, reliable diagnostic tools. Today there exist however no diagnostic tests for the early and rapid diagnosis of this disease. In this study, we report for the first time the possibility of identification of possible biomarkers associated with dengue disease in the exhaled air, and of the development of a breath test for fast, non-invasive and easy diagnosis of this disease. Further, we demonstrate a new deployable sensor technology based on a chemoresistive metal-ligand nanoassembly tailored for the identified possible biomarkers of dengue disease, which achieved 100 % accuracy for dengue diagnosis on our study group and can be used in both specialist and non-specialist settings. Nevertheless, as the present study was performed on a limited number of patients because of the difficulty to recruit a high number of patients because dengue is a neglected disease, future validation tests on a higher cohort are necessary for corroborating the results obtained in the present study.