Exhaled breath analysis: the new frontier in medical testing

Abstract

With each breath we exhale, thousands of molecules are expelled in our breath and each one of us has a ‘breathprint’ that can tell a lot about his or her state of health. While this may be news to some, it should not be to people in medicine. For one can argue that the field of breath analysis is as old as the field of medicine itself. Hippocrates described fetor oris and fetor hepaticus in his treatise on breath aroma and disease, Lavoisier and Laplace in 1784 showed that respiration consumes oxygen and eliminates carbon dioxide [1], Nebelthau in the mid 1800s showed that diabetics emit breath acetone [2], and Anstie in 1874 isolated ethanol from breath (which is the basis of breath alcohol testing today) [3].