Purpose of the study: Exhaled breath condensate (EBC) is increasingly being used for disease diagnosis and environmental exposure assessment as a noninvasive method reducing the risk of exposure. The purpose of this study was to investigate the application of a new sample type of EBC in pneumonia by metabolomics and to explore differential metabolites and potential metabolic pathways.
Materials and methods: A case-control study was performed at the Peking University Third Hospital from August to December 2020. C-MS/MS analyses were performed on EBC samples using a UHPLC system.
Results: Totally 22 patients with pneumonia and 24 healthy controls were recruited. Using untargeted metabolomics based on LC-MS/MS analysis, 25 kinds of differential metabolites were found. Through a comprehensive analysis of the pathways in which the differential metabolites were located, the key pathway with the highest correlation with the difference of metabolites was taurine and hypotaurine metabolism.
Conclusions: The study implicates that the hypotaurine/taurine metabolic pathway may play a role on the development of pneumonia through metabolism analysis on EBC and the 3-Sulfinoalanine may be used as a biomarker in the diagnosis of pneumonia.
Keywords: 3-Sulfinoalanine; exhaled breath condensate; metabonomic; pneumonia.