ArticleProceedings (Baylor University. Medical Center)2026
Volatomic profiling of blood identifies environmental chemicals associated with metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease in lean US adults.
Article in Proceedings (Baylor University. Medical Center), 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundMetabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) affects lean individuals, but the contribution of environmental exposures remains poorly understood. This study investigated whether blood volatomic profiling of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) identifies environmental chemicals associated with MASLD and advanced fibrosis in lean adults using explainable machine learning.
methodsWe performed a cross-sectional analysis of lean adults from the NHANES 2017-2020 survey with whole-blood measurements of nine VOCs. XGBoost decision trees were used to evaluate associations between VOC profiles, MASLD, and advanced fibrosis. Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) quantified the contribution of individual VOCs and characterized exposure-response patterns.
resultsAmong 860 lean adults, 9.0% had MASLD and 1.6% had advanced fibrosis. The MASLD model demonstrated modest discrimination (area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve [AUC-ROC] 0.65), whereas the advanced fibrosis model performed poorly (AUC-ROC 0.24) because of limited events. Chloroform was the strongest VOC associated with both MASLD and advanced fibrosis, followed by o-xylene, bromodichloromethane, benzene, and furan. SHAP analyses demonstrated nonlinear exposure-response relationships and high sensitivity to small variations in low-level VOC concentrations.
conclusionBlood volatomic profiling identified distinct VOC signatures associated with MASLD in lean adults, with chloroform as the dominant contributor. Exploratory findings also suggested potential associations with advanced fibrosis that warrant validation in larger studies.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.