Breath analysis is a young field of research with old roots. Hippocrates (460-370 BCE, Kos, Greece) first described fetor oris and fetor hepaticus in his treatise on breath aroma and disease. Much later, in 1782-83, Antoine Lavoisier detected carbon dioxide in the exhaled breath of guinea pigs and interpreted this as a product of combustion. In 1898, Johannes Muller performed the first quantitative investigations of acetone in exhaled breath. In 1971, Linus Pauling showed that more than 30 different volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are contained in breath. Another influential study published by Simenhoff et al. in 1977 showed that dimethylamine and trimethylamine appear in the 'uremic breath' of patients suffering from end-stage renal disease.
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