Publications by authors named "E Westenbrink"
Article Synopsis
- Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) is a leading cause of chronic liver disease in the West, and current diagnostic tools like Fibroscan have limitations, highlighting the need for better non-invasive methods.
- A pilot study with 34 patients examined whether changes in urinary volatile organic compounds (VOCs), linked to the gut microbiome, could effectively differentiate between NAFLD and Non-Alcoholic Steatohepatitis (NASH).
- Results showed that while sensitivity was moderate, specificity was high, indicating that VOC analysis could potentially serve as a promising non-invasive approach to early liver disease detection and differentiation between NAFLD and NASH.
Colorectal cancer is a leading cause of cancer death in the USA and Europe with symptoms that mimick other far more common lower gastrointestinal (GI) disorders. This difficulty in separating colorectal cancer from these other diseases has driven researchers to search for an effective, non-invasive screening technique. Current state-of-the-art method of Faecal Immunochemical Testing achieving sensitivity ~90%, unfortunately the take-up in the western world is low due to the low patient acceptability of stool samples.
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- Coeliac disease (CD) affects about 1% of the UK population and is often confused with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), but can be diagnosed through serology and duodenal biopsies, with symptom improvement on a gluten-free diet.
- The study explored whether urinary volatile organic compounds (VOCs) could differentiate CD from diarrhea-predominant IBS through advanced analysis techniques like Field Asymmetric Ion Mobility Spectrometry (FAIMS) and Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS).
- Results showed that FAIMS could effectively distinguish CD from D-IBS with high accuracy, and identified a unique compound in CD samples, suggesting potential for a non-invasive diagnostic method and monitoring for gluten-free diet compliance.
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a leading cause of cancer related death in Europe and the USA. There is no universally accepted effective non-invasive screening test for CRC. Guaiac based faecal occult blood (gFOB) testing has largely been superseded by Faecal Immunochemical testing (FIT), but sensitivity still remains poor.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBile acid diarrhoea (BAD) is a common disease that requires expensive imaging to diagnose. We have tested the efficacy of a new method to identify BAD, based on the detection of differences in volatile organic compounds (VOC) in urine headspace of BAD vs. ulcerative colitis and healthy controls.
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