ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) – It is one of the Top 10 leading causes of death and affects five million people in the U.S. Now, doctors at the Cleveland Clinic are testing a new, non-invasive way to detect kidney failure.
Doctors can test your blood and urine for diseases, but now a new device is allowing them to test your breath.
Raed Dweik, MD, Director of Pulmonary Vascular Program at Cleveland Clinic explained, “If you can do it at the side of the road, you can do it anywhere.”
He believes that you can see the health of a patient through their breathprint.
“Anything that is potentially volatile in our blood comes up in the lung and can be measured in exhaled breath,” Dweik said.
Such as kidney failure. A healthy kidney gets rid of wastes and toxins in a person’s blood. When the kidneys are not functioning properly, they can cause kidney stones and possibly death.
Dweik and his team are trying to prevent this, by testing for kidney failure using a breathalyzer. In a study of patients with kidney failure and healthy volunteers, he was able to identify five volatile organic compounds in the breath of patients with kidney failure. The device is still being analyzed before it goes to clinical trials.
Researchers also plan to study the effects of dialysis on kidney failure patients’ breathprint. Dweik has worked on other breath test studies as well, developing breath tests for asthma, heart failure, liver disease, and obesity.
Contributors to this news report include: Milvionne Chery, Producer; Roque Correa, Editor.