Abstract

In gastroenterological practice, breath tests (BTs) are diagnostic tools used for indirect, non-invasive assessment of several pathophysiological metabolic processes, by monitoring the appearance in breath of a metabolite of a specific substrate. Labelled substrates originally employed radioactive carbon 14 (14C) and, more recently, the stable carbon 13 isotope (13C) has been introduced to label specific substrates. The ingested 13C-substrate is metabolized, and exhaled 13CO2 is measured by mass spectrometry or infrared spectroscopy. Some 13C-BTs evaluate specific (microsomal, cytosolic, and mitochondrial) hepatic metabolic pathways and can be employed in liver diseases (i.e. simple liver steatosis, non-alcoholic steato-hepatitis, liver fibrosis, cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma, drug and alcohol effects). Another field of clinical application for 13C-BTs is the assessment of gastric emptying kinetics in response to liquids (13C-acetate) or solids (13C-octanoic acid in egg yolk or in a pre-packed muffin or the 13C-Spirulina platensis given with a meal or a biscuit). Studies have shown that 13C-BTs, used for gastric emptying studies, yield results that are comparable to scintigraphy and can be useful in detecting either delayed- (gastroparesis) or accelerated gastric emptying or changes of gastric kinetics due to pharmacological effects. Thus, 13C-BTs represent an indirect, cost-effective and easy method of evaluating dynamic liver function and gastric kinetics in health and disease, and several other potential applications are being studied

Autore Pugliese

• Portincasa Piero

Tutti gli autori

• PALASCIANO G.;PORTINCASA P.

Titolo volume/Rivista

Non Disponibile

Anno di pubblicazione

2014

ISSN

2052-0034

ISBN

Non Disponibile

Numero di citazioni Wos

Nessuna citazione

Ultimo Aggiornamento Citazioni

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Numero di citazioni Scopus

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Ultimo Aggiornamento Citazioni

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Settori ERC

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Codici ASJC

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