Although different studies have shown that diseases such as breast or lung cancer are associated with specific bodily odours, no study has yet tested the possibility that epileptic seizures may be reflected in an olfactory profile, probably because there is a large variety of seizure types. The question is whether a “seizure-odour”, that would be transversal to individuals and types of seizures, exists. This would be a pre requisite for potential anticipation, either by electronic systems (e.g., e-noses) or trained dogs. The aim of the present study therefore was to test whether trained dogs, as demonstrated for cancer or diabetes, may discriminate a general epileptic seizure odor (different from body odours of the same person in other contexts and common to different persons). The results were very clear: all dogs discriminated the seizure odour. The sensitivity and specificity obtained were amongst the highest shown up to now for discrimination of diseases. This constitutes a first proof that, despite the variety of seizures and individual odours, seizures are associated with olfactory characteristics. These results open a large field of research on the odour signature of seizures. Further studies will aim to look at potential applications in terms of anticipation of seizures.
Although epilepsy is considered a public health issue, the burden imposed by the unpredictability of seizures is mainly borne by the patients. Predicting seizures based on electroencephalography has had mixed success, and the idiosyncratic character of epilepsy makes a single method of detection or prediction for all patients almost impossible. To address this problem, we demonstrate herein that epileptic seizures can not only be detected by global chemometric analysis of data from selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry but also that a simple mathematical model makes it possible to predict these seizures (by up to 4 h 37 min in advance with 92% and 75% of samples correctly classified in training and leave-one-out-cross-validation, respectively). These findings should stimulate the development of non-invasive applications (e.g., electronic nose) for different types of epilepsy and thereby decrease of the unpredictability of epileptic seizures.
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