Intravenous [13C]-methacetin breath test for evaluation of liver function in cirrhotic patients and healthy controls

Quantitative determination of metabolization dynamics by a real-time 13 CO 2 breath test

“…Yet most breath tests are only able to deliver information for groups of patients and not for a single patient. The reported 13 C-methacetin breath tests are able to statistically discriminate healthy patients from those with severe liver disease [21,22] but are not able to precisely determine the liver function of an individual patient. The shortcomings of those non-personalized tests can have different causes.…”

“…Oral administration of substrates with gastric adsorption dynamics masks the metabolization dynamics of the liver [9,[22][23][24][25]. Furthermore they lack normalization routines for each individual [21] and collect unspecified or varying parts of the breath for investigation [26]. The human breath is especially inhomogeneous (see above) and an error source for highly accurate measurements [15,26].…”