Epilepsy affects some 50 million people worldwide and pharmaceutical treatment of the disease is a tightrope walk, as the dose must be tailored precisely to the individual patient: “Slightly too little and it isn’t effective. Slightly too much and it becomes toxic,” explains Professor Pablo Sinues.
Sinues is Botnar Research Professor of Pediatric Environmental Medicine at the University of Basel and University Children’s Hospital Basel (UKBB). He is also a member of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Basel. Together with colleagues from University Hospital Zurich (UHZ), he spent two and a half years looking for a way to tailor the dosage of drugs administered to epilepsy patients as precisely as possible. They ultimately achieved this goal with the help of a breath test.