The beauty in Ted Talks is being in tune with the perspective of professionals from all walks of life who enlighten you. Julian Burschka talks about something that is overlooked and sometimes completely ignored in medical screenings.
Your breath.
Honestly, it never occured to me that you could potentially detect diseases using breathing analysis. Just goes to show how much information is out there that isn’t utilized until someone highlights it.
Key Points:
- A large fraction of deaths
is caused by slow causing diseases. - Successful treatment relies on when treatment is started
- A disease is usually only detected once symptoms occur
- This causes
disease to be undetected for a long period of time - Due to this, there is a need to detect diseases at an earlier stage, before symptoms even occur
- Otherwise known as screening
- Screening is the key to helping detect early diseases
- Breathing is an essential way we can screen for diseases
- Breath Analysis – could be the future of detecting onset diseases. An example of this is the breathalyzer.
- The breath analysis works by a sensor that can
detects the volatile compounds in our breath - If you have a disease, your organism will change, and so will the composition of your exhaled breath
Benefits of breath analysis testing:
- could be created into a portable device that you can take from home
- simplicity – only using your breath
- versatility – could be used to screen for multiple diseases
- low cost of testing
Longitudinal Data – tracks the same patients over the course of months or years <— better than the limited data system medical companies use now.
By using longitudinal data – we’ll be able to detect abnormalities based on your own medical history as opposed to the sum of others.
While this could be the future – there are challenges that have to be worked out before this concept to come to fruition:
Over diagnosis - The probability that you might not actually suffer from [said] detected disease
- Regret that the disease was detected in the first place
- Early treatment – side effects
As they continue to work on this new concept, there are lots of important factors to take into consideration. With the continuous collection of data, they will understand and provide this powerful tool to the masses to predict and prevent diseases.