#28- BREATHALYZER Can Diagnose 17 Diseases
The new breathalyzer isn't ready for the market yet — further testing and better accuracy are needed first — but the study is an encouraging development, the researchers said.
If it's made available to doctors, the device could be an "affordable, easy-to-use, inexpensive and miniaturized [tool] for personalized screening, diagnosis and follow-up,"
A single breath into a newfangled breathalyzer is all doctors need to diagnose 17 different diseases, including lung cancer, irritable bowel syndrome and multiple sclerosis, a new study found.
Researchers invited about 1,400 people from five different countries to breathe into the device, which is still in its testing phases. The breathalyzer could identify each person's disease with 86 percent accuracy, the researchers said.
The technology works because "each disease has its own unique breathprint," the researchers wrote in the study.
Meanwhile, the carbon layer worked as a sensing layer to hold the exhaled volatile organic compound(VOCs), the scientists said. When a person breathed into the breathalyzer, that individual's VOCs interacted with the organic sensing layer, which in turn changed the electrical resistance of the inorganic sensors. By measuring this resistance, the researchers could determine which VOCs were present, the scientists said.If it's made available to doctors, the device could be an "affordable, easy-to-use, inexpensive and miniaturized [tool] for personalized screening, diagnosis and follow-up,"
A single breath into a newfangled breathalyzer is all doctors need to diagnose 17 different diseases, including lung cancer, irritable bowel syndrome and multiple sclerosis, a new study found.
Researchers invited about 1,400 people from five different countries to breathe into the device, which is still in its testing phases. The breathalyzer could identify each person's disease with 86 percent accuracy, the researchers said.
The technology works because "each disease has its own unique breathprint," the researchers wrote in the study.
To investigate using breath for diagnosis, the researchers developed a breathalyzer that had two nanolayers, one with carbon and the other without. The carbon-free layer contained modified gold nanoparticles and a network of nanotubes, both of which provide electrical conductivity, the researchers said.
There are hundreds of known volatile organic compound(VOC), but the researchers needed only 13 to distinguish among the 17 different diseases. For instance, the VOC nonanal is linked to several disorders, including ovarian cancer, inflammatory bowel disease and breast cancer, whereas the VOC isoprene is associated with chronic liver disease, kidney disease and diabetes, the researchers said.
