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Breathalyzers are no longer just good for getting a DUI citation. Now when a police officer suspends your driver’s license he can throw in, “By the way, not only is your blood alcohol level over the legal limit, but according to my breathalyzer—you have an inoperable malignant brain tumor.” Indeed, scientists have found that by simply blasting a person's breath with laser light, you can detect specific molecules that will tell you whether or not they have specific diseases like diabetes or cancer.
Actually, this StarTrekish advancement is not intended to diagnose drunkenness (although it can do that too), but rather is meant to make professional medical diagnostics quicker, less expensive, less painful and potentially even more accurate that current methods. Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder say the advancement would allow doctors to simultaneously screen for a variety of conditions with a mere exhale. Known as optical frequency comb spectroscopy, the technology earned it’s creators a Nobel Prize in physics, and is powerful enough to sort through all the molecules in human breath while also being sensitive enough to distinguish rare molecules that can serve as biomarkers for specific diseases.
"This technique can give a broad picture of many different molecules in the breath all at once," said Jun Ye, a fellow of JILA and NIST who led the research.
Normal breathing involves inhaling a complex mixture of gases, including nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water vapor and traces of other gases like carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide and methane, said Ye. Once exhaled, our breath contains less oxygen, more carbon dioxide and a rich trace collection of more than a thousand types of other molecules. He says that just as bad breath can indicate dental problems, excess methylamine can signal liver and kidney disease, excess ammonia is a sign of renal failure, elevated acetone levels indicates diabetes and nitric oxide levels can be used to diagnose asthma, for example. When many breath molecules are detected simultaneously, highly reliable, disease-specific information can be collected.
"The new technique has the potential to be low-cost, rapid and reliable, and is sensitive enough to detect a much wider array of biomarkers all at once for a diverse set of diseases," he said.
The optical frequency comb is a very precise laser for measuring different colors, or frequencies, of light, said Ye. Each comb line, or "tooth," is tuned to a distinct frequency of a particular molecule's vibration or rotation, and the entire comb covers a broad spectral range -- much like a rainbow of colors -- that can identify thousands of different molecules.
Laser light can detect and distinguish specific molecules because different molecules vibrate and rotate at certain distinct resonant frequencies that depend on their composition and structure, he said. He likened the concept to different radio stations broadcasting on separate radio frequencies.
The optical frequency comb was developed in the 1990s by Ye's JILA, NIST and CU-Boulder colleague John L. "Jan" Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch of Germany's Max-Planck Institute, who shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in physics with Roy J. Glauber for their work.
Ye's group has pioneered the application of frequency combs to spectroscopy, or the analysis of light emitted or absorbed by matter. The technique allows for many different gases to be detected all at once with high sensitivity through their interaction with light from such "combs," demonstrated by Thorpe, Ye and colleagues in the journal Science.
But what about personal health assessment and prevention? Could the general public ever get their hands on this kind of technology to perform their own regular ‘at-home” health screenings?
Ye told The Daily Galaxy, “I think the first step would be its widespread use in clinic trials for noninvasive, robust, and low-cost diagnosis for preventive medicine. Personal use at home may come later, if the cost of such devices can be lowered a bit more.”
Posted by Rebecca Sato
*Portions of this post were adapted from an Optical Society of America and University of Colorado at Boulder news release.
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