A simple breath test developed with the help of a Canadian researcher could reveal lung cancer in its earliest, more treatable stages.
Canada's Dr. Peter Mazzone led a team of researchers at the Cleveland Clinic to develop a quarter-sized sensor that detects the unique breath chemicals of people with lung cancer. If a patient has early-stage cancer, the sensor changes colour, alerting doctors that the patient may have cancer.
Not only is the test non-invasive, it is also relatively inexpensive when compared to CT scans, MRIs, chest X-rays or surgical biopsies -- the current cancer detection methods.
Mazzone's researchers tested the sensor on 122 patients with respiratory diseases, including 49 people with small cell lung cancer at various stages of development, as well as 21 healthy people.
They had the subjects breathe into the apparatus for 12 minutes and then analyzed the results to detect the unique volatile organic compounds that are produced by lung cancer cells.
They found that the colorimetric sensor was able to accurately predict the presence of cancer in nearly three of four people, the team reports in the online issue of the journal Thorax.
While Mazzone says the results were promising, his team was disappointed with the number of false positives the test revealed.
"Right now, the sensor we used was between 70 and 75 per cent accurate," Mazzone told Canada AM.
"That's pretty good but certainly not good enough to use clinically at this time."
His team hopes that with further research, they can pinpoint the exact chemicals in the breath of lung cancer patients to increase the sensor's accuracy rate to 100 per cent.
"My best estimate would be five to 10 years of further research before we would have a tool that we could apply to patients in our clinic," he says.
The Canadian Cancer Society says that every year, 22,000 Canadians contract lung cancer. About 95 per cent of patients don't survive because, by the time symptoms emerge, it's usually too late to treat.
Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death for both men and women.
