Air and breath analysis for the assessment of exposure to solvent emissions in university chemistry laboratories

Sánchez, Juan Manuel

doi:10.1016/j.apr.2019.07.011

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Breathomics, is being developed to stratify patient phenotypes, and monitor metabolic and disease mechanisms [1][2][3], and biomarker discovery with breathomics is being applied to conditions that include respiratory disease, cancer, infections and pulmonary illnesses [4][5][6]. Further, breath analysis for assessing occupational exposure to volatile organic compound (VOC) is well-established [7][8][9]. A challenge in the development of clinical breath-testing is accounting for the heterogeneity of patient responses to variable backgrounds of environmental VOC.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The variability of volatile organic compounds in the indoor air of clinical environments

et al. 2021

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The development of clinical breath-analysis is confounded by the variability of background volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Reliable interpretation of clinical breath-analysis at individual, and cohort levels requires characterisation of clinical-VOC levels and exposures. Active-sampling with thermal-desorption/gas chromatography-mass spectrometry recorded and evaluated VOC concentrations in 245 samples of indoor air from three sites in a large National Health Service (NHS) provider trust in the UK over 27 months. Data deconvolution, alignment and clustering isolated 7344 features attributable to VOC and described the variability (composition and concentration) of respirable clinical VOC. 328 VOC were observed in more than 5% of the samples and 68 VOC appeared in more than 30% of samples. Common VOC were associated with exogenous and endogenous sources and 17 VOC were identified as seasonal differentiators. The presence of metabolites from the anaesthetic sevoflurane, and putative-disease biomarkers in room air, indicated that exhaled VOC were a source of background-pollution in clinical breath-testing activity. With the exception of solvents, and waxes associated with personal protective equipment (PPE), exhaled VOC concentrations above 3 µg m−3 are unlikely to arise from room air contamination, and in the absence of extensive survey-data, this level could be applied as a threshold for inclusion in studies, removing a potential environmental confounding-factor in developing breath-based diagnostics.

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