Dr. Brian Ross is exploring ways to capture and measure the gas molecules in our breath because he believes these “chemical markers” have a lot to tell us about our health.

 

Ross is an Associate Professor of Neuropharmacology with the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM), West Campus. He is working with Dr. Ed Rawana, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Lakehead University, to see if a possible link exists between low levels of Omega-3 Fatty Acid and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

 

But first, some background.

 

Ross started his academic journey at Glasgow University in Scotland, where he did an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry. After completing a PhD on the pharmacology of Alzheimer’s disease (which got him interested in the neuroscience of the brain), he did a year of post-doctorate fellowship in Toronto at the Clarke Institute, now called the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. He continued work at the Clarke Institute for the following nine years as an Assistant Professor with the University of Toronto.

 

When Ross moved back to Scotland to take up a new position at the University of the Highlands and Islands, the ball really got rolling on some interesting neuroscience research.

 

The University of the Highlands and Islands is a 13-campus university in Scotland, connected by video-conferencing. Ross was responsible for the Highland Psychiatric Research Foundation, also called the Ness Foundation, because of its location by the shores of Loch Ness. An important area of research there was the role of Omega-3 fatty acids, and their breakdown products, on the brain.

           

“We found that these products get formed into a whole load of other chemicals,” says Ross. Enzymes in the body break down Omega-3 fatty acids into molecules that function as blood-thinners, antidepressants, and chemicals required for a number of brain functions. In an upcoming study being jointly conducted with Ed Rawana, Brian Ross hopes to see if a possible link exists between low levels of Omega-3 fatty acids and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

 

It was his study of Omega-3 fatty acids that led Ross to a new and potentially groundbreaking field of study. Omega-3 fatty acids, when broken down in the body, produce a chemical called ethane. The handy thing about ethane is that to remove it from your body, you breathe it out. So an obvious way to try and measure Omega-3 fatty acid levels in your body would be to try and detect how much ethane is in your breath. There’s actually a device called a Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometer (GC-MS) that can be used to identify substances in a gas. The catch? It’s completely useless in the presence of water or water vapor, of which our breath is around 6%. Removing the water and testing a sample could take 45 minutes to an hour. Working with the equipment was not much fun, says Ross, “Every week this thing broke down.”

 

Thank goodness for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In the 1960s, NASA developed a new gas analysis technique called Selected Ion Flow Tube Mass Spectrometry (SIFT-MS). SIFT-MS loves water; in fact, its presence helps with the analysis of certain chemicals. So quantifying what is in the breath, a process Ross has dubbed “breathometrics,” suddenly becomes much easier. Even so, a SIFT-MS built to analyze breath is hard to come by. Thanks to Dr. Brian Ross, Lakehead’s medical school has the only one designed for breath analysis in North America. 

 

It gets better. The most common method used for storing and testing gases in the modern world is to use a device called a “thermal desorption tube,” which stores the gas molecules on a tube of carbon or similar materials. To date, no SIFT-MS device has ever been modified to work with a thermal desorption tube, thus limiting their usefulness in day-to-day life. But Brian Ross and his team are working with manufacturers in Britain to produce the world’s first ever SIFT-MS device that can work with thermal desorption tubes. If this works, and there’s no real reason it shouldn’t, Lakehead University will be home to the only equipment of this kind on the planet.

 

The potential is staggering. Unlike Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS), Selected Ion Flow Tube Mass Spectrometry (SIFT-MS) can test for multiple chemicals at once, and in real time. Besides ethane for Omega-3, there are loads of other chemical “markers” emitted by the body that can indicate what is going on inside. Unlike a blood test or a Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) Scan, the testing is quick and non-invasive − simply blow a breath sample into a tube or machine. Because most healthy people don’t go in for extensive testing until after they display symptoms, diseases like lung cancer are rarely caught early and are usually a death sentence. But if extensive testing amounted to simply giving a breath sample, lung cancer could have a better survival rate.

 

Says Ross, “A colleague of mine once asked me to imagine a loaded double-decker bus driving off a cliff every day. That’s the death rate of lung cancer in the United Kingdom. Even if we could only save one row of passengers, just imagine the impact.”

 

Indeed.