Most people only associate breath tests with getting in trouble. But a new breath test may soon test how healthy your gut is.
In recent years, scientists have been studying the microbes in our gut to learn how they keep us healthy and the role they can play in diseases. It turns out it plays a massive role in our health and wellness and can be a factor in conditions like asthma.
The problem is, in practical situations, putting what scientists have learned into practice is slowed by not knowing about each patient’s individual microbiome.
“One of the key barriers to integrating our knowledge of the microbiome into clinical care is the time it takes to analyze the data on the microbiome,” said Ariel Hernandez-Leyva, a graduate student in gut microbiome researcher Andrew Kau’s group at Washington Univ. School of Medicine.
But, researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia found that the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) of children with asthma could accurately predict the amount of associated bacteria they had in their gut. This suggests using breath could be a way to diagnose conditions with known gut microbes.
As the microbes in our gut break down food, they release VOCs. The researchers compared 27 healthy children’s breath to the breath samples of 14 children with asthma. Four VOCs were very different. They predicted the levels of asthma-associated bacteria based on those VOCs. When they checked with stool samples, they were correct. The researcher performed a similar test in mice and got the same results.
“Rapid assessment of the gut microbiome’s health could significantly enhance clinical care, especially for young children,” said Dr. Kau. “Early detection could lead to prompt interventions for conditions like allergies and serious bacterial infections in preterm infants. This study lays the groundwork for developing such crucial diagnostic tools.”
“Breath analysis offers a promising, noninvasive way to probe the gut microbiome and can transform how we diagnose disease in medicine,” said Ms. Hernandez-Leyva.
The university has produced breath tests that detected microbes in the past. This work could make one that spotted early changes in the microbiome before they become problematic. It could be especially useful for premature infants to make sure their microbiome is developing correctly and they aren’t developing an infection. The team concluded that “breathomics” will be a powerful diagnostic tool in the future, as it is fast and noninvasive.
