AFTER receiving a heart transplant in March, Michael Sinno endured painful monthly biopsies to make sure his body wasn't rejecting his new organ. In August, instead of going under the knife again, his doctor surprised him -- by asking him to just breathe into a tube.
The device sampled his breath, then a lab checked it for key chemicals that would indicate rejection.
"It was such a relief ... this was fast and I wasn't sore afterward," says Sinno, 56, of East Stroudsburg, Penn.
The tool, known as the Heartsbreath test, won't completely replace painful biopsies, but it can be a good adjunct and patients prefer it, says Dr. Mark Zucker, director of the Heart Failure Treatment and Transplant Center at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, N.J.
It is one of a number of new diagnostic tests that stand to make detecting disease as simple as exhaling.
A billion times more sensitive than the breathalyzers police use on traffic stops, these breath sensors can already spot a diverse array of medical conditions: asthma, ulcers, trouble with a heart transplant. Trials are underway on breath tests for tuberculosis and the early detection of lung cancer.
Someday soon, some scientists predict, hand-held devices similar to a Palm Pilot may be routinely used for the early detection of breast, colon and other cancers, tuberculosis, diabetes and pre-eclampsia, the dangerous hypertension that sometimes occurs during pregnancy.
"All we need to know is the chemical fingerprint of a disease and we can devise a test for it," says Dr. Michael Phillips, an internist at the New York Medical College in Valhalla.
Phillips invented one of these devices, which is made by Menssana Research in Fort Lee, N.J. Small enough to sit on a tabletop, it consists of a powerful pump that sucks a patient's breath through a long steel tube. Carbon lining the tube absorbs the volatile organic compounds excreted in the breath, and a small carbon cartridge about the size of a pen is then analyzed in the laboratory.
First, a lab machine known as a gas chromatographer separates all the different molecules in the breath, then another, a mass spectrometer, identifies these chemicals.
The procedure itself is painless: The patient simply breathes into the tube for two minutes.
Recent tests of the Menssana device have been encouraging. In a 2003 pilot study of 201 women, some of whom had diagnosed breast cancers, the breath test identified 88% of those cancers. The test's accuracy is comparable to a mammogram.
