Dogs Smell Cancer

[Kelly]

I watched a show on animal planet about this and kinda forgot about it. Someone was asking about dog's sense of small on another forum, which brought this back to mind. So I googled it. Amazing what dogs can do!

Dogs 'smell' bladder cancer

By Deborah Condon

They already help guide the blind, track down people lost on mountains, sniff out illegal drugs that are being smuggled and of course provide companionship to people the world over. Now it appears that man's best friend can also detect bladder cancer, by smelling a person's urine.

Tumours are thought to produce volatile organic compounds with distinctive odours. Even when present in tiny quantities, it is possible that dogs, with their exceptional sense of smell, can detect these odours.

A team of British researchers decided to test this. Their study involved urine samples from 36 patients with bladder cancer and 108 samples from people who were either healthy or had a non-cancerous disease. Sixty-three samples were used exclusively in the final testing of the dogs.

Six dogs from varying breeds were then trained over a seven-month period to differentiate between urine that had come from the bladder cancer patients and urine that had come from the control group.

For the final tests, each dog was offered a set of seven urine samples, one of which was from a bladder cancer patient, while the remainder were from the controls. All seven samples came from participants of the same sex and where possible, the same age. Most of the control samples also had some form of non-malignant urological disorder.

The dogs had been trained to identify the bladder cancer sample of urine by lying next to it. Each dog performed nine separate tasks.

Taken together as a group, the dogs correctly selected bladder cancer urine on 22 out of 54 occasions. That is an average success rate of 41%, compared to 14% expected by chance alone.

"Our study provides the first piece of experimental evidence to show that dogs can detect cancer by olfactory (smelling) means more successfully than would be expected by chance alone", the researchers from the Amersham Hospital in Buckinghamshire said.

The dogs' capacity to recognise a characteristic odour from the bladder cancer samples was 'independent of other chemical aspects of the urine, such as the presence of blood', they added.

Details of this study are published in the British Medical Journal.

[sheltiepups]

Thats pretty neat!

[DFrost]

I think it's an excellant example of what we don't know about the dog's olfactory system. One of the most interesting statements made about the olfactory system I've read was part of a report on research conducted by a major university relative the dog's use in law enforcement for the detection of explosives and drugs. They were attempting to identify the smallest odor concentration a detector dog was capable of detecting and responding too. In essence the report stated that they were unable to detect that, and if they could the only relevance would be "under labratory conditions". I've read of similar studies where dogs were being used to detect cancer. Unbelieveable, even after all these years working with dogs, they still amaze me.

DFrost