Mariana Farraia, a research fellow at the Instituto de Saúde Pública da Universidade do Porto (ISPUP), was recently awarded by the European Academy of Allergy & Clinical Immunology for a study that evaluated the use of an electronic nose – a device that evaluates patients’ exhaled air – in a clinical context, with the purpose of helping physicians identify patients with asthma, in order to personalize the treatment plan.
The study, entitled Human Volatilome Analysis To Identify Individuals With Asthma In Clinical Settings, and supervised by the ISPUP researchers André Moreira and João Rufo, aimed to evaluate if an electronic nose could detect differences between exhaled air in people with symptoms suggestive of asthma.
“We used the electronic nose to evaluate the air exhaled by people with asthmatic symptoms, so that we could assess differences in the exhaled compounds, which are caused by the inflammatory state of the airways that characterize these patients, and thus be able to use precision medicine in treatment“, explains Mariana Farraia, the first author of the study, who was honored at the aforementioned Congress held in Norway, between January 24 and 27.
“In people with asthma and respiratory disease, the inflammatory state of the disease causes changes at the cellular level that are reflected in the air expelled. The electronic nose evaluates the profile of compounds present in the air samples and seeks to detect differences in the air exhaled by people with asthma”, she says.
Given that asthma is a complex disease in which diagnosis is often a difficult and poorly adjusted process for each patient, the study, which will be published, is intended to help create more diagnostic tools to detect asthma and help doctors more appropriately manage the treatment of each patient.
The work, developed in two stages, namely the creation of the algorithm that allows the diagnosis by the electronic nose and a subsequent validation in a real clinical environment, also received a prize to be presented at ISAF – the International Severe Asthma Forum 2018, which took place in Madrid, between 8 and 10 November 2018.
According to data from the National Health Survey (INS), the prevalence of asthma in Portugal is 5.3% (approximately 530 thousand people). This work served to support future work by the research group, which is to develop an algorithm that allows identifying the most severe forms of asthma that need a differentiated clinical approach. This is of particular importance since recent INS results showed that about 1.4% of the Portuguese population is affected.
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