Better diagnosis/prognosis of preschool asthma by an innovative breath test

A point-of-care breath test for better prognosis and less health care costs of preschool children with asthma-like symptoms

 

 In a public private partnership between Maastricht UMC+ and Alphaszenszor Inc., we further developed a breath test for an early asthma diagnosis in preschool children. 

Societal/economic impact: Childhood asthma is the most common chronic disease in children. Asthma-like symptoms in pre-schoolers are common (360,000 children in the Netherlands, 15 million children in the EU). Most preschoolers outgrow their symptoms when they are 5-6 years of age (also called ‘viral or transient wheeze’), a smaller part (1/3 part) keeps symptoms and has asthma. A reliable asthma diagnosis in young children is currently not possible, which leads to under diagnosis/under treatment of asthma and over treatment of children with viral wheeze. We demonstrated the proof-of-principle that exhaled inflammation markers (volatile organic compounds, VOCs) enable an early asthma diagnosis in young wheezing children (ADEM1 study). 

Project’s approach and conceptualisation: The overall aim of the project was the further development of the breath test for young wheezing children into a small, reliable, and fast, point-of-care (POC) breath test, which can discriminate between early asthma and viral wheeze. 

Main conclusion: The main conclusion was that the GC-MS breath test for an early asthma diagnosis is an accurate test. We were able to further improve sensitivity/specificity of the breath test by further standardisation and correction for confounding factors on the level of environment, patient, sampling, analysis, and statistical handling of row data. Moreover, we showed that the breath test based on the SIFT-MS technique is a good alternative for the GC-MS, which is less time consuming and less complex. 

Deliverables and end results: 

  • 1 patent application 
  • a spinoff company (Breath Medics) 
  • a new project with a public partner (750,000,- euro) and one with an industrial partner (300,000,- euro) 
  • 10 WI1 publications (7 accepted/published) and 2 PhD theses (1 in preparation) 

breath test

Summary
Underdiagnosis and undertreatment of asthma in preschoolers is common. This project studies the ability of a breath test (based on various analytical techniques) to diagnose asthma at an early age. We found that a reliable asthma diagnosis based on the breath test is possible already at an early age.
Technology Readiness Level (TRL)
7 - 9
Time period
54 months
Partners