A shot of science '18

A shot of science: sniffing out death?

I celebrated my 31st birthday in style, by speaking at a Pint of Science, I gave a 2 minute "Shot of Science". Here is a copy of the talk I gave, a lay summary of my project:

Sniffing out death?

Everyone here will have had a stinky wee at one time or another. Maybe you’re one of the 50% of people who can smell the breakdown down products of Asparagus in their wee just hours after eating it. Maybe you’re a regular coffee drinker, and you know that distinctly coffee fragrance to your pee a few hours after you drink a cup. What these two examples show us is that urine, wee, is a really useful liquid and call tell us all sorts of things about changes happening in the body.

Maybe you’ve heard of medical detection dogs? Dogs can not only be trained to sniff out drugs at airports but also to sniff out the wee of prostate cancer. At the University of Liverpool, we’ve got an interest in “smelling wee” in diseases such as prostate and bladder cancer, so that we might be able to earlier diagnose and treat such conditions earlier. We don’t use our own noses (thank goodness) or dogs, but instead a sort of “electronic nose”, a technique called gas chromatography mass spectrometry.

My project is a more of a sombre topic. When patients or their loved ones are sadly told by doctors that their cancer is no longer responding to treatment, or has returned and there are no cures. They will often ask “How long have I got left?” Doctors struggle to answer this question because whilst there are some indicators, of prognosis, there is no one accurate marker. But answering the question of how long?, well is absolutely vital to providing the best care possible to the patients and their family at what is a really difficult time. My hope is that we might be able to detect changes in the wee in the last month of life, indicating that someone is dying.

The data is dribbling through, but so far, we’ve found 17 gases whose levels change in the last month of life. I think this project is WEELY interesting – and I hope you do too!