Breath test to tell when the fat starts to burn off in the gym

British scientists are developing a breathalyser that can tell gym-goers the moment their workout starts burning fat rather than food. The device detects minute changes in acetone, a molecule exhaled when the body has used up its readily available food energy and switches to breaking down fat instead. Today's exercise machines can only estimate when someone enters the "fat burning zone"; a breath test could pinpoint it.

The work comes from Oxford chemist Professor Gus Hancock, who founded the company Oxford Medical Diagnostics to develop the machine. Hancock originally began the research hoping to build a way of screening patients for diabetes, a disease that creates elevated levels of acetone in breath.

The device works through spectroscopy, a technique that measures which wavelengths of light different molecules in a gas absorb. By shining an infrared laser through a complex series of mirrors, the instrument can register even tiny shifts in acetone levels when a person breathes into it.

Professor Hancock said: "We started thinking that our techniques could be applied to the detection of different chemicals in human breath and would that be useful if there was a correlation between the gases in human breath and disease. When you are ill, the concentrations of different molecules change. Acetone is associated with diabetes and we have already developed a detection system that can see acetone at about the levels that are important for the diagnosis of diabetes. We would like to set this up as a screening method for diabetes as there are so many people who suffer from it, particularly type 2 diabetes, but they don't know they have it."

Diabetes is currently diagnosed with a blood test sent to a laboratory, but a breath test could one day let patients be screened at their doctor's surgery without giving blood. Hancock is also starting a clinical trial to examine whether breath acetone can track blood sugar (glucose) levels, which diabetes patients now monitor by pricking their fingers several times a day.

Professor Hancock added: "It is pretty distressing for people who have to prick their finger four times a day to test their blood glucose levels, particularly for children. We hope to eventually produce a hand-held instrument that can be breathed into by diabetes sufferers."

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This article reports on early-stage research. It is general information, not medical advice -- talk to a clinician about diabetes screening or testing.