Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder discovered that if a person’s breath is tested with a laser light, it can detect molecules related to diseases like asthma or cancer.

According Jun Ye, the leader of the research team from JILA, a joint institute of NIST and CU-Boulder, the technique will offer a bigger picture for the molecules in just one breath.

When people breathe, a mixture of gases is inhaled like nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water vapor and traces of gases like carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide and methane.

Exhaling, we eliminate less oxygen, more carbon dioxide and over thousand of molecules, which are there in trace amounts.

So, excess methylamine may indicate liver problems and kidney disease, while ammonia may show a sign of renal failure. Also Ye says that high levels of acetone can point to diabetes and nitric oxide levels may show signs of asthma.

According to Ye, information about a disease may be gathered if breath molecules are identified simultaneously.

For example asthma may be detected when carbonyl sulfide, carbon monoxide and hydrogen peroxide are traced altogether with nitric oxide.

Ye says that the equipment is not that selective in order to choose a set of rare biomarkers or it cannot trace particular amounts of molecules which are exhaled in the human breath.

Ye said: "The new technique has the potential to be low-cost, rapid and reliable, and is sensitive enough to detect a much wider array of biomarkers all at once for a diverse set of diseases," medicalnewstoday.com reports.

The technique was tested on a group of volunteer students who had to breathe into an optical cavity while sets of ultra fast lasers were transmitted into it. They found that the technique permits for many gases to be analyzed at the same time and to diagnose a disease.

The report can be found in the February edition of Optic Express.