Could your breath help doctors determine if you have cancer? That's the theory behind a new device under study now at the Cleveland Clinic. Researchers there say they are finding early signs of lung cancer in this new breath test.
Dr. Peter Mazone said, "We found that we can be in the 80 to 85 percent accuracy range at detecting lung cancer from the breath signature, that we were a little more accurate if we looked for a specific type of lung cancer rather than lung cancer in general."
It's just a five minute breath test for $75. Researchers say it works by finding specific biomarkers produced by the cancerous tumor. It's still under study, but if this becomes widely available, researchers say it could be a dramatic breakthrough.
Lung cancer continues to be the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, and it is often not diagnosed until the late stages when it's much harder to treat. This test would find lung cancer on the breath in an early stage of the disease.
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