Breath test for diabetes

Non-invasive test can pick up the whiff of disease. Physicists have developed a simple breath test that may be capable of detecting Type I diabetes. The results, presented on 5 March at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver, Colorado, could lead to non-invasive ways to check for the disease, and possibly even a cheap new tool for monitoring daily glucose levels without drawing blood. Type I diabetes, often called juvenile diabetes, is a condition in which the body fails to produce insulin, a chemical that breaks down glucose. The resulting elevated blood-sugar levels can send patients into shock, and over the long term can lead to blindness, kidney damage and heart disease. It can also cause a fruity smell on the breath. Today, Type 1 diabetes is detected by directly extracting a small amount of blood and measuring the amount of glucose it contains. But it may also be possible to detect diabetes on the breath, long before the fruity smell is detectable to the human nose, according to Armstrong Mbi, a graduate student at Mississippi State University. Mbi and his advisor Chuji Wang have developed a new technique to detect acetone, one of the chemicals whose presence in the lungs increases when blood-sugar levels are elevated. The team injected acetone-laden water vapour into a small chamber with mirrors on both ends. They then flashed an infrared laser sensitive to the acetone into the chamber. By detecting the amount of time it took the light to completely dissipate as it bounced back and forth between the mirrors, the duo was able to detect trace amounts of acetone down to concentrations of 0.45 parts per million by volume (ppmv).... Whole article: "www.nature.com":[ http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070305/full/070305-3.html]

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