Volatile Organic Compounds of Exhaled Air, Feces and Urine as Biomarkers in the Diagnosis of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases

Aim: to analyze the results of studies that examined volatile organic compounds of various analytes (exhaled air, feces, urine) for the diagnosis of inflammatory bowel diseases.

Materials and methods. A systematic electronic literature search was conducted (without restrictions on the language or type of publication) using the Medline/PubMed, Embase, Scopus and Web of Science databases using keywords.

In the process of analyzing the published articles, the quality of the created diagnostic models was evaluated.

Results. To study volatile organic compounds, metabolomic methods involving the quantification of compounds and so-called “electronic noses” are used — various types of sensors to create a “pattern” of metabolites. It has been shown that the determination of volatile organic compounds in exhaled air, feces, urine is inexpensive, affordable, acceptable to patients and doctors, has high diagnostic accuracy, allowing to distinguish patients with inflammatory bowel diseases from healthy individuals, differentiate nosological forms — ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, the activity of the disease, monitor the nature of its course. Sensitivity and specificity indicators for solving different diagnostic tasks vary depending on the method used (the combined sensitivity and specificity of volatile orga- nic compounds as biomarkers for distinguishing patients with inflammatory bowel diseases from healthy individuals were 87 % (95 % confidence interval (CI): 0.79–0.92) and 83 % (95 % CI: 0.73–0.90), respectively, with an AUC of 0.92), the analyte under study, the number of volatile organic compounds analyzed, the number of patients examined, and consideration of influencing factors.

Conclusion. Volatile organic compounds demonstrate great potential as noninvasive biomarkers of inflammatory bowel diseases. In the future, more extensive multicenter prospective studies are needed to develop optimal approaches to sampling, standardizing the analysis and interpretation of volatile organic compounds data in solving various diagnostic tasks in patients with inflammatory bowel diseases.

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