Scientists Develop Breathalyzer for Disease

Feb. 19, 2008 — -- It may one day be possible to walk into your doctor's office and breathe into a small device that will tell you if you are in the earliest stage of a wide range of diseases from lung cancer to asthma to kidney failure.

Early detection is the key to survival when it comes to many medical problems, and the first place some diseases show up is in the breath.

Scientists have just revealed that they have produced a machine that can identify single molecules that are associated with specific diseases, and all that's required is a little breath.

"It's very noninvasive," said physicist Jun Ye, leader of the research team that is working on the technology. "There's nothing to be scared of. No blood test, just a breath test."

Ye is a research fellow at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Ye and research assistant Michael Thorpe, doctoral student Matthew Kirchner and former graduate student David Balslev-Clausen described their work in the Feb. 18 online edition of Optics Express, published by the Optical Society of America.

It has been well established that people exhale a complex mixture of gases, including oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and others, Ye told ABCNEWS.com. In fact, more than 1,000 different compounds are contained in human breath. But along with those common gases and compounds, people also exhale certain molecules that are considered "biomarkers" indicating specific conditions, such as diseases.

"If you go to the medical literature you will see tons of studies that correlate certain diseases with particular molecules found in the breath," he said. "One common example is nitrous oxide, which is associated with asthma."

Recognizing that fact, scientists for some time now have been trying to develop the technology to identify those molecules in the breath, thus detecting a disease that may not show up anyplace else. Several techniques have been advanced, but Ye said they all fall short because of the old needle-in-the-haystack problem.