The Breathscanner: An Easier Way to Detect Diseases

Police have been using a device called a breathalyzer to determine whether motorists have had too much to drink for years. But recently, doctors have started to use a similar device, a billion times more sensitive than the police breathalyzer, to detect diseases in people such as diabetes and lung cancer. Such tests are by definition noninvasive and simple.

The device is called the Breathscanner. The first version of the Breathscanner has recently moved from the laboratory to clinical trials. The way it works is that it detects volatile organic compounds in the human breath than can be indicators of human disease. Then a mobile gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy are used to analyze these VOCs within minutes. A second version of the Breathscanner, smaller, more efficient, and capable of doing the analysis in real time is under development.

The idea that examining the human breath can be a way to detect diseases is as old as medicine itself. Hippocrates, the father of medicine in Ancient Greece, knew that the aroma of human breath can provide clues to diagnosis. For instance, a sweet, fruity odor of acetone in patients suggests uncontrolled diabetes. A musty, fishy reek indicates advanced liver disease. A urine-like smell accompanies failing kidneys. A putrid stench could mean a lung abscess.

Lavoisier, in eighteenth century France, was the first to analyze breath and demonstrate that it contains carbon dioxide. This was the first scientific evidence that the body burns foodstuffs while consuming oxygen and generating carbon dioxide. In the nineteenth century, researchers developed breath tests for alcohol, and also for acetone which is increased in diabetes mellitus.

The modern era of breath testing commenced in 1971, when Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling breathed through a very cold tube to “freeze out” the volatile organic compounds or VOCs. He then analyzed these frozen compounds with a gas chromatograph and found that normal human breath contains many different VOCs in very low concentrations.
Scientists now know that normal human breath usually contains more than 200 different volatile organic compounds, most of them around one part in a trillion. Researchers suspected that some of these breath VOCs may be markers of disease, but the idea remained only a theory because the concentrations of most breath VOCs are so low that they can only be detected with sensitive laboratory instruments. Also, even after analyzing the breath VOCs, nobody understood what they signified.

A company called Menssana Research Inc. has overcome these technical problems. The Breathscanner, a portable breath collection apparatus, can collect breath samples anywhere. A patient breaths quietly into the BCA for two minutes, while it captures breath VOCs onto an absorbent device which looks like a stainless steel cigarette. This device is then sent to the laboratory for analysis by gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy. Each analysis usually identifies more than 200 different VOCs.

This breath test has identified a new and comprehensive set of markers of oxidative stress known as the breath methylated alkane contour (BMAC). Changes in the BMAC have revealed distinctive changes in a number of different diseases each can be identified with its own unique breath fingerprint.

The Breathscanner is being used in a number of clinical trials for the detection of such diseases as lung cancer, breast cancer, heart transplant rejection, kidney disease, ischemic heart disease, and diabetes mellitus. It is hoped that this device will eventually be as common as a chest x ray and will be used to detect diseases in their earliest stages. Lung cancer, for instance, is a deadly form of cancer which can be far more easily treated if it can be detected in the earliest stages. The Breathscanner would be able to diagnose cancer and other diseases without invasive and often painful test that are necessary with today’s technology.

The second version of the Breathscanner will be a hand held device, the size of a palm pilot, that anyone can own. Unlike the first version, it will be able to detect disease using VOC markers in breath immediately, without recourse to sending a sample to a lab. Some day, ordinary people might own such a device, use them periodically, and would be able to call the doctor after a negative reading. Thus people will be empowered to handle an important part of their own health care needs.