Did you know that our breath is a biomarker for asthma? Many reports indicate that breath can serve as a potential biomarker for various diseases. Over the last few years, the field of breathomics has grown, and it has developed systematic reviews considered important enough for dissemination in high-impact clinical research journals like the European Respiratory Journal.
The idea that breath can serve as a biomarker discovery platform has excited the medical world, and there is a huge demand for it, especially in cases of pediatric asthma, lung infections, and fibrotic lung diseases. In this issue of the European Respiratory Journal, a new systematic review covers breathomics in adult asthma. It has been found that high-quality reports are relatively few; only 22 studies met the broad inclusion criteria, most of which investigated breath for disease identification rather than more refined targets, such as asthma phenotyping or identification of treatment responses.
The most commonly stated aim in current studies is to investigate potential breath biomarkers that can be used in the diagnosis of asthma.
