A Breath Test to Detect Bacterial Overgrowth in Elderly

细菌过度生长是一种主要在老年人中发现的疾病，估计影响65岁以上人群的33%。 如果不治疗，它会引起严重的不适和临床上重要的营养缺乏症。 其根本原因是与衰老相关的胃酸分泌减少。 由于不存在低成本和易于使用的诊断测试，阻碍了对过度生长的管理。检测是有意义的，因为虽然这种情况永远不会治愈，但可以通过治疗有效控制。我们的目标是开发一种易于使用和成本效益的测试来检测细菌过度生长。临床效用是能够像金标准（空肠培养物）一样准确地检测表现出典型疾病症状但通常不会接受昂贵和侵入性空肠培养的患者中的细菌过度生长。 该测试将准确检测治疗前后的病情，并改善生活质量。这项提议的新奇在于使用了一种非侵入性的呼吸测试，这种测试采用了一种天然存在的糖作为探针，这种糖用碳13标记。 如果存在过度生长，则细菌存在，小肠中的细菌代谢标记底物，呼吸中呼出高浓度的（13）CO（2）。拟定商业应用：有2500万美国人年龄超过65岁，他们占1000万医生办公室就诊与投诉的经典过度生长症状，拟议的测试将显着减少国家医疗保健支出，因为正确的诊断将导致更少的办公室就诊，更谨慎地使用药物和更好的一般健康和老年人的福祉。

Bacterial overgrowth is a condition found primarily in the elderly and is estimated to affect 33% of people over 65 years. It causes great discomfort and clinically important nutritional deficiencies if left untreated. The underlying cause is reduced gastric acid secretion associated with aging. Management of overgrowth is hampered because low cost and easy to use diagnostic tests do not exist. Detection is meaningful because while the condition is never cured it can be effectively controlled through treatment. Our objective is to develop an easy to use and cost effective test to detect bacterial overgrowth. The clinical utility is the ability to detect the bacteria overgrowth as accurately as the gold standard (jejunal cultures) in patients exhibiting classic disease symptoms but whom ordinarily wouldn't receive expensive and invasive jejunal culture. The test will accurately detect the condition pre- and post-therapy and lead to quality of life improvement. The novelty of this proposal is the use of a non-invasive breath test employing a naturally occurring sugar labeled with carbon-13 as a probe. If overgrowth is present, the bacteria is present, the bacteria in the small intestine metabolize the labeled substrate and high concentrations of (13)CO(2) are expired in the breath. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: There are 25 million Americans over the age of 65 and they accounted for 10 million physician office visits with complaints of classic overgrowth symptoms The proposed test will significantly reduce national health care expenditures because proper diagnosis will lead to fewer office visits, more prudent use of drugs and better general health and well-being in the elderly.