Method development and optimization for exhaled breath metabolites monitoring

Abstract

The peppermint Initiative was created to overcome the lack of standardization in exhaled breath analysis. It is an inter-analytical platforms-benchmarking study, which was carried out in the OBiAChem laboratory. Concretely, in each analytical platform, the defined peppermint protocol was repeated on the exhaled breath of at least 10 subjects to monitor specific metabolites of the peppermint oil in the exhaled breath. With the resulting data, a statistical analysis will be carried out and should represent the variability range between laboratories and different types of instrumentation. Concerning the OBiAChem laboratory, the exhaled breath was sampled in Tedlar® bags and the target VOCs were analyzed by a TD-GC×GC-HRTOFMS. A previous optimization step on the exhaled breath sampling method was done and this determined the suitable sampling bags for the exhaled breath analysis, 1L Tedlar® bags. The data analysis highlighted that almost all of the monitored metabolites of peppermint oil gave reproducible results leading to the conclusion that the exhaled breath sampling method which was used is a reproducible method.