A study using an electronic nose to predict bowel changes after pelvic radiotherapy (PREDICT)

Having radiotherapy to your pelvis can change the way your bowel works. We know that many people are affected.

Everyone has bacteria in their gut. It helps keep us well. Healthy people have a large number of different types of bacteria. Radiotherapy can change the number of different types of bacteria in the gut. Looking at the way these bacteria change may help us understand and predict who will and who will not experience bowel problems long term.

Each type of bacteria has an individual smell. The electronic nose is a device that can sniff these individual smells. The researchers have used the electronic nose in a very small study to sniff the poo (stool) samples of people before and after they had radiotherapy. They found that it could identify those people who would develop severe bowel symptoms as a long term problem following radiotherapy from samples taken before or at the start of treatment.

In this study the researchers are looking at a larger number of people diagnosed with a different kind of cancer. This is to confirm the results they got from the previous smaller study.

The team will also collect other samples, such urine and spit (saliva) samples, as well as poo samples. This is to find out if the electronic nose can use a variety of samples to predict who may develop bowel problems after treatment. This is because one sample may be easier to provide than the other.