(Excerpt from Health Lab)
“The emergence of new COVID-19 variants has led to reduced accuracy across current rapid testing methods, but a recent University of Michigan study suggests that a patient’s breath might hold the key to a more precise diagnosis.
Investigators from the University of Michigan’s Max Harry Weil Institute for Critical Care Research and Innovation, including faculty and students from the College of Engineering and Michigan Medicine, used portable gas chromatography to examine breath samples collected during the pandemic’s Delta surge and its transition to Omicron (from April 2021 to May 2022.)
Their results, published February 28 in JAMA Network Open, showed that the GC technology could diagnose COVID-19 with a high level of accuracy. They also revealed that the volatile organic compounds contained in the breath of patients with Omicron differed from those in patients with Delta and earlier variants—molecular-level differences which, according to the team, could potentially be used to distinguish between COVID-19, its variants and non-COVID illnesses.