A review of exhaled breath: a key role in lung cancer diagnosis

One of the main causes of the high mortality rate in lung cancer is the late-stage tumor detection.
Early diagnosis is therefore essential to increase the chances of obtaining an effective treatment
quickly thus increasing the survival rate. Current screening techniques are based on imaging, with
low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) as the pivotal approach. Even if LDCT has high accuracy, its
invasiveness and high false positive rate limit its application to high-risk population screening. A
non-invasive, cost-efficient, and easy-to-use test should instead be designed as an alternative.
Exhaled breath contains thousands of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Since ancient times, it has
been understood that changes in the VOCs ’ mixture may be directly related to the presence of a
disease, and recent studies have quantified the change in the compounds ’ concentration. Analyzing
exhaled breath to achieve lung cancer early diagnosis represents a non-invasive, low-cost, and
user-friendl...

Source: Journal of Breath Research - March 30, 2019 Category: Respiratory Medicine Authors: Davide Marzorati, Luca Mainardi, Giulia Sedda, Roberto Gasparri, Lorenzo Spaggiari and Pietro Cerveri Source Type: research