A recent study has shown that the metabolites (basically, the chemicals present) in exhaled breath could be just as useful to medics as the chemicals found in urine and blood when diagnosing illness. Exhaling breath is a great method - it's non-invasive and gives instant results.
So why is this the case? Studies have shown that there is a precise type of bacteria which cause lung infections exhaled in the breath as well as those in the presence of stomach cancer!
Could this really be as effective as a fingerprint? Are the chemicals present in the population's breath really that varied? I'm not too sure, as from first-hand experience i'm sure we can all say that after we've drank a cup of coffee or eaten some garlic bread, the contents of our breath does noticeably change.
However a study was done where the breath of some volunteers was repeatedly taken over a week or so. Mass spectroscopy was used to analyse the samples. Obviously there were some compounds present in all samples such as carbon dioxide and water vapour, however compounds which appeared to be unique to each volunteer remained constant throughout the study. I guess this means that we might all have a unique composition of breath, right?
This is really an interesting idea and I hope that it really goes somewhere as I think it could really improve the efficacy of diagnostic methods.
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