Due to an outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in recent years, the emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2 causing diagnostic challenges. The rapid, non-invasive diagnostic is an urgent need to differentiate between infected with asymptomatic or symptomatic individuals and uninfected with COVID-19 to control the silent virus spreading in the community. This research developed alternative method of detecting COVID-19, in these approaches mainly focused on volatile organic compound (VOCs) in armpit sweat samples derived from population in Thailand, during variants occurring between April 2021 to May 2023, including Delta and Omicron BA.1/BA.2. VOCs odor emission produced in response to inflammation and infection from SARS-CoV-2 infection body by Gerstel Multi-purpose sampler, headspace solid-phase microextraction coupled with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (HS-SPME/GC-MS) technique with the total of 150 collected sweat samples with 75 negative confirmed COVID-19 and 75 positive confirmed COVID-19 cases (asymptomatic/symptomatic) used to identified potential biomarkers for COVID-19 related with peak areas of chromatogram results. The statistical analysis of ROC curves including classification rate indices of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of the different potential markers for armpit sweat samples in GC-MS allowed potential VOCs biomarkers to discriminate the COVID-19 patients as nonanal and aromatic compounds (up to 92% sensitivity, 97% selectivity, and 96% specificity), respectively, and validated the results by comparison with the RT-PCR gold standard technique.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, I.T. and K.C.; methodology, I.T. and K.C.; software, S.S.; validation, I.T., K.C. and S.S.; formal analysis, C.K.; investigation, S.S., K.C. and C.K.; resources, S.S., K.C. and C.K.; data curation, I.T.; writing—original draft preparation, I.T. and S.S.; writing—review and editing, I.T. and S.S.; visualization, K.C. and C.K.; supervision, S.S. and K.C.; funding acquisition, K.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This research was funded by Chevron Thailand Exploration and Production, Ltd.
Institutional Review Board Statement
The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Central Research Ethics Committee (COA-CREC103/2020), and approved by the Institutional Review Board at the Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University (897/63).
Informed Consent Statement
Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.
Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare that this study received funding from Chevron Thailand Exploration and Production, Ltd. The funder had the following involvement with the study: K9 dogs sniff COVID-19 in Thailand. The authors declare that this study received funding from Chevron Thailand Exploration and Production, Ltd. The funder was not involved in the study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article or the decision to submit it for publication.
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