• needle trap micro-extraction
• heart failure
• GC-MS/MS
• breath analysis
• volatile organic compounds

Over the last few years, breath analysis for monitoring metabolic disorders caused by specific diseases has become more and more attractive due to its non-invasiveness. Several approaches have been proposed for sample collection, treatment, and analysis, devoted to the qualitative evaluation of various chemical compounds.
This experimental thesis has been devoted to the development and optimization of analytical procedures for the quantitative determination of several chemical compounds in human breath samples. The optimized analytical procedure includes the simultaneous collection of the alveolar breath fraction, analyte pre-concentration in suitable needle trap device, packed with a combination of sorbent materials (i.e. DVB, Carbopack X and Carboxen 1000) followed by GC-MS/MS analysis. The main critical aspect of this approach resulted the influence of the amount of water in the sorbent material on the thermal desorption step, especially for samples characterized by variable humidity levels. In this work, the use of a combination of labelled internal standards, able to represent the different chemical-physical proprieties of the selected 60 volatile organic compounds, was investigated to solve this issue.
Finally, the optimized analytical procedure was applied to the analysis of breath samples gathered from patients with heart failure disease. The preliminary results were very promising, and would seem to indicate that this monitoring technique could be used in clinical applications.