Abstract
By checking the reproducibility of conventional mid-infrared Fourier spectroscopy of human breath in a small test study (15 individuals), we found that a set of volatile organic compounds (VOC) of the individual breath samples remains reproducible at least for 18 months. This set forms a unique individual’s “island of stability” (IOS) in a multidimensional VOC concentration space. The IOS stability can simultaneously be affected by various life effects as well as the onset of a disease. Reflecting the body state, they both should have different characteristics. Namely, they could be distinguished by different temporal profiles: In the case of life effects (beverage intake, physical or mental exercises, smoking etc.), there is a non-monotonic shift of the IOS position with the return to the steady state, whereas a progressing disease corresponds to a monotonic IOS shift. As a first step of proving these dependencies, we studied various life effects with the focus on the strength and characteristic time of the IOS shift. In general, our results support homeostasis on a long time scale of months, allostasis on scales of hours to weeks or until smoke quitting for smokers, as well as resilience in the case of recovery from a disease.
Highlights
By checking the reproducibility of conventional mid-infrared Fourier spectroscopy of human breath in a small test study (15 individuals), we found that a set of volatile organic compounds (VOC) of the individual breath samples remains reproducible at least for 18 months
Variations of VOC concentrations are of the same order of magnitude as the variations identified in the course of the longitudinal study
Let us focus on the finding of foremost importance, namely the evidence of compact and stable island of stability” (IOS) identified for all participants
Summary
By checking the reproducibility of conventional mid-infrared Fourier spectroscopy of human breath in a small test study (15 individuals), we found that a set of volatile organic compounds (VOC) of the individual breath samples remains reproducible at least for 18 months. Two examples of those: (a) several small alkanes and alkenes such as ethane, whose proton affinities are less than water, can’t be detected by PTR-MS, one of the most advanced and widely used MS techniques; (b) being developed for extraction and detection of large metabolites, ESI-MS has not demonstrated significant progress so far[16,17] mostly because of the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) resulting from a low number of generated ions in gas phase Another popular technique called electronic nose (e-nose)[18], lacks physical and chemical control of the sample and is so far not reproducible in different laboratories. Homeostasis claims stability of a set of physiological parameters, allostasis - its variability and related resilience - its return to a steady state after termination of strong effects, like recovery from a disease
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