Chronic heart failure affects around six million people in the United States while causing about 55,000 deaths each year. Researchers are now suggesting that number can be substantially reduced with just one breath.

A cutting-edge breath test may be able to detect if someone is experiencing heart failure just by exhaling a breath for identification.

Heart failure occurs when the heart muscle is unable to pump enough blood to facilitate what the body needs for blood flow and oxygen. As a result, daily activities such as walking, lifting things or any other physical activity can be accompanied by troubled breathing and fatigue.

During test trials, patients were asked to breath into a hand-held breath test device that checked for volatile organic compounds that are present in exhaled breath.

Lead author of the study Dr. Raed Dweik says the key to solving this medical innovation lies in a unique impression in the human breath that is exclusive to each person, like a fingerprint.

Dweik said, "We consistently kept finding that patients with heart failure had a different breathprint. So, you analyze their breath; you always find there is something different about it than patients who do not have heart failure."

Dweik and his team of researcher's claim that patients who were admitted to a Cleveland health clinic for suspicion of heart failure were successfully diagnosed with 100 percent accuracy, HealthDay U.S.News reported.

Although early test trials have shown promising results, the research team added that this assessment was made with a small group of test subjects. More research would have to be conducted in order to give a definitive answer to the device's effectiveness.

The study was published in March 25 edition of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.