American journal of respiratory and critical care medicine
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Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med. · Aug 2019
Exhaled Volatile Organic Compounds Are Able to Discriminate between Neutrophilic and Eosinophilic Asthma.
Rationale: Analysis of exhaled breath for asthma phenotyping using endogenously generated volatile organic compounds (VOCs) offers the possibility of noninvasive diagnosis and therapeutic monitoring. Induced sputum is indeed not widely available and markers of neutrophilic asthma are still lacking. Objectives: To determine whether analysis of exhaled breath using endogenously generated VOCs can be a surrogate marker for recognition of sputum inflammatory phenotypes. ⋯ For neutrophilic asthma, the combination of nonanal, 1-propanol, and hexane had a classification performance similar to FeNO or blood eosinophils in eosinophilic asthma. Those compounds were found in higher levels in neutrophilic asthma. Conclusions: Our study is the first attempt to characterize VOCs according to sputum granulocytic profile in a large population of patients with asthma and provide surrogate markers for neutrophilic asthma.