New Breath Test Could Help Personalize Treatment Options for Epileptic Patients

A simple breath test can provide reliable estimates of circulating concentrations of a widely used anti-seizure medication. Researchers from the University of Basel spent two and a half years and found a real-time solution to tailor the dosage of drugs administered to epilepsy patients. Around 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, making it one of the most common neurological diseases globally, says the World Health Organization. The complications of epilepsy include seizures, difficulty learning, and Injury from falls, bumps, self-inflicted bites.

The pharmaceutical treatment of the disease is much more complicated: “Slightly too little, and it isn’t effective. Slightly too much and it becomes toxic,” explains Professor Pablo Sinues.

In the current study, the team developed and tested the efficacy of a simple breath test among both the young patients at UKBB and the adult reference group at the University Hospital Zurich.

“You can think of it as being like the alcohol test that police use when they stop drivers. The difference is that this breath measurement device is actually a big machine. “Because alcohol is present at high concentrations in breath, one only needs a small device. But we’re searching for a droplet in 20 swimming pools,” says Professor Sinues.

Both the breath tests produced the same results in measuring the circulating concentrations of medications as conventional blood tests. There was also a way to which patients are likely to benefit from the treatment and which ones are likely to suffer from unwanted side effects.

The team published their study published in the journal Communications Medicine . “Thanks to this favorable initial situation, we can build machines that are precisely tailored to the needs of doctors,” adds Professor Sinues.



Source-Medindia