Wong, DC, Relton, SD, Lane, V et al. (6 more authors) (2019) Bedside breath tests in children with abdominal pain: a prospective pilot feasibility study. Pilot and Feasibility Studies, 5. 121. ISSN 2055-5784
Abstract
Background: There is no definitive method of accurately diagnosing appendicitis before surgery. We evaluated the feasibility of collecting breath samples in children with abdominal pain and gathered preliminary data on the accuracy of breath tests.
Methods: We conducted a prospective pilot study at a large tertiary referral paediatric hospital in the UK. We recruited 50 participants with suspected appendicitis, aged between 5 and 15 years. Five had primary diagnosis of appendicitis. The primary outcome was the number of breath samples collected. We also measured the number of samples processed within 2 h and had CO2 ≥ 3.5%. Usability was assessed by patient-reported pain pre- and post-sampling and user-reported sampling difficulty. Logistic regression analysis was used to predict appendicitis and evaluated using the area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AUROC).
Results: Samples were collected from all participants. Of the 45 samples, 36 were processed within 2 h. Of the 49 samples, 19 had %CO2 ≥ 3.5%. No difference in patient-reported pain was observed (p = 0.24). Sampling difficulty was associated with patient age (p = 0.004). The logistic regression model had AUROC = 0.86.
Conclusions: Breath tests are feasible and acceptable to patients presenting with abdominal pain in clinical settings. We demonstrated adequate data collection with no evidence of harm to patients. The AUROC was better than a random classifier; more specific sensors are likely to improve diagnostic performance.
Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT03248102. Registered 14 Aug 2017.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019, The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
Keywords: | Appendicitis; Child; Exhalation; Volatile organic compounds; Breathomics; Biomarkers |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Biological Sciences (Leeds) > School of Biomedical Sciences (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 11 Nov 2019 11:04 |
Last Modified: | 11 Nov 2019 11:04 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | BMC |
Identification Number: | 10.1186/s40814-019-0502-x |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:153286 |