ORIGINAL RESEARCH Assessment of the breath

Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleIntroduction Many patients seeking care at the hospital emergency departments (EDs) are under the influence of alcohol, which in many cases implies a differential diagnostic problem [1-3], and assessing the influence from alcohol based on patient anamnesis, clinical signs or characteris-tics introduce inaccuracies [4,5]. For this reasons early objective alcohol screening is of importance in order not to falsely assign the medical condition to intake of alcohol and thus secure a correct medical assessment [1,3,6,7]. A breathalyzer provides a non-invasive and rapid quantification of the patients ’ breath alcohol concentra-tion (BrAC). With use of a conversion factor, called the blood:breath ratio (BBR), the blood alcohol concentra-tion (BAC) can be estimated [8,9]. However, the accur-acy of the measured BrAC and thus the estimate of the BAC depend on the duration of the expiration which re