Breath Test May Screen for Diabetes
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For the test, the subject drinks a solution of glucose labeled with a short-lived radioisotope, carbon-13. A breath analyzer then measures the amount of exhaled carbon dioxide labeled with carbon-13.
“This novel breath test method may assist in recognition of pre-diabetes or early-stage diabetes in at-risk persons without the need for invasive blood sampling, thus making it an attractive option for large-scale testing of at-risk populations, such as children,” the researchers write in the medical journal Diabetes Care.
To test the method, Dr. Melinda Sheffield-Moore, at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and her colleagues collected blood and breath samples from 17 subjects every 30 minutes for 10 hours after they consumed a drink containing radiolabeled glucose. The team measured glucose level in the blood samples and the ratio of labeled-to-unlabeled carbon dioxide in the breath samples.
Based on the blood glucose readings, 10 of the subjects were normal while 7 had either pre-diabetes or early-stage diabetes.
“Remarkably,” the investigators report, “the breath analyzer was capable of detecting marked differences in glucose-derived breath carbon dioxide kinetics between (normal and pre-diabetic) individuals within 60 minutes.”
Specifically, the amount of carbon-13 labeled carbon dioxide was much lower in the pre-diabetic group than the non-diabetic subjects between 1 and 3 hours after the glucose load.
Sheffield-Moore and her associates suggest that it would be feasible to use a breath analyzer and storable breath collection bags for large-scale diabetes screening.
March 9th, 2009 at 8:20 am
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