Breath test may spot lung cancer

A new breathalyzer has been developed to both detect and assess various stages of lung cancer, providing an accurate detection in four out of five cases. According to study author Dr. Nir Peled, an oncologist at the Davidoff Cancer Center in Israel, "cancer cells not only have a different and unique smell or signature, you can even discriminate between subtypes and determine disease burden." The breathalyzer can be plugged directly into a computer's USB port, and could prove to be a low-cost first step to weed out people who definitely do not have lung cancer, lowering the cost of lung cancer screening. To read more about this study, presented on June 1, 2014 at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago, click here.