Breath test sniffs out lung cancer
Afp, Paris
A breath test based on coloured dots can give doctors a good fix on whether a patient has lung cancer, a study published on Monday in the British specialist journal Thorax says. Individuals with lung cancer exhale a unique signature of so-called volatile organic compounds, which can be captured and analysed by a chemical colour sensor. Researchers led by Peter Mazzone at The Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, tested the gadget on 122 people with different types of respiratory disease -- 49 of whom had small-cell lung cancer at various stages of development -- and on 21 healthy people. They used the results from tests on 70 percent of the study participants to finetune the sensor and then used it on the remaining 30 percent of the volunteers. It was able to accurately predict the presence of cancer in 73.3 percent of the people who had lung cancer. Cancer often shows no symptoms in its early stages, so it is essential to diagnose the disease as soon as possible.
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