Every person's breathing is unique, and it says a lot about our overall health

Did you know that, just as we all have unique fingerprints, we also have our own unique nasal respiratory fingerprint? But also that, far from being just a vital function, it is a powerful indicator of our physical and mental health? This is revealed in a new study by the Weizmann Institute of Science in Tel Aviv, published in the journal Current Biology. To test the hypothesis that humans have unique respiratory fingerprints and that these fingerprints can provide information about brain performance, scientists developed a small portable respiratory recorder, which they used to accurately measure continuous nasal breathing over 24 hours in 100 healthy participants (52F, mean age = 26.33 ± 3.61 years, range = 18–35 years). Of these, 42 participants then returned for a second 24-hour session (mean inter-test interval = 3.5 months, range = 5 days to 23 months). The device uses flexible tubes placed under the nostrils and records breathing patterns throughout the day, not just over a few minutes, as most standard breathing tests that assess lung health do.Participants recorded their basic daily activity using a dedicated mobile app and completed several questionnaires. Excluding corrupted data, the researchers analyzed a total of 97 participants.They found that they could identify members of the cohort with 96.8% accuracy based solely on nasal airflow patterns. “In other words, every human being has a nasal airflow fingerprint,” they explain.In order to extrapolate the sample to the population, the scientists repeated the analysis, this time randomly selecting only 20 participants for analysis (chance = 5%), and repeated the process 100 times for wakefulness and sleep separately. During wakefulness, they obtained 93.78% ± 5.35% individual identification. They repeated this analysis on 40, 60, and 80 participants, obtaining 90.41% ± 3.1%, 89.56% ± 2.5%, and 90.82% ± 1.7% (chance = 5%, 2.5%, 1.67%, and 1.25%, all binomial p 2.18).During sleep, researchers achieved an identification accuracy of 79.66% ± 7.22%, and in 40, 60, and 80 participants, identification accuracy decreased to 74.72 ± 4.3, 72.64 ± 3.37, and 71.29 ± 2.08, respectively (chance = 5%, 2.5%, 1.67%, and 1.25%, all binomial p 1.76). “Lower performance during sleep may reflect a genuinely reduced specificity in sleep compared to wakefulness, or it may simply reflect reduced power due to the shorter duration of sleep periods compared to wakefulness,” the authors wrote. In their discussion, the authors add that overall sleep data were occasionally disrupted by the cannula shifting out of the nostril during sleep.Furthermore, during test-retest experiments, they found that “these prints remain stable over long periods of time, ranging from a few months to nearly two years, so that individual identification using these prints was comparable to, or even superior to, voice recognition.”Finally, the Weizmann Institute of Science team found that the high sensitivity of these prints provided significant insights into physiological states—such as alertness levels and body mass index—and cognitive traits—such as anxiety levels, depression, and behavioural tendencies. None of the participants had been formally diagnosed with mental health or behavioural disorders at the start of the research.“Measuring nasal airflow over time provides remarkably informative data, enabling personal identification at the biometric level and the estimation of various physiological and cognitive measures,” the researchers concluded.The latter is consistent with the high levels of depression and anxiety observed in patients with respiratory disorders and the improvement in mood and cognitive abilities thanks to respiratory changes."

Every person's breathing is unique, and it says a lot about our overall health

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