Dogs can smell lung cancer on a patient's breath - Healthy Living ...

Dogs can smell lung cancer on a patient?s breath

August 23rd, 2011, 6:00 am ? Post a Comment ? posted by Landon Hall

Pooches like this Australian shepherd can be trained to sniff certain markers on lung-cancer cells.

After billions spent on research and high-tech screening devices, one of the most efficient cancer-detecting tools turns out to have a wagging tongue, and it loves to have its ears scratched.

A study out of Germany and published in the European Respiratory Journal shows that dogs detected with fairly high accuracy the presence of lung cancer, just by sniffing the bottled-up-breath of subjects.

Researchers have for some time thought that certain cancerous cells carry the whiff of something called volatile organic compounds, which no human or even machine can sniff out. Dogs, however, use their amazing olfactory abilities to determine when tumors are present. They can even tell the compounds from other chemicals present, such as tobacco smoke.

Previous research has demonstrated that pooches can detect other cancers, including prostate.

In this study, conducted at Schillerhoehe Hospital, researchers trained four dogs ? two German shepherds, an Australian shepherd and a Labrador ? to find cancer among three groups of patients: 110 healthy people, 60 who had lung cancer, and 50 who had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a narrowing of the airways in the lungs.

According to the BBC, the dogs:

? all breathed into a fleece filled tube, which absorbed any smells. The dogs sniffed the tubes and sat down in front of those in which they detected lung cancer smells.

The animals correctly identified the cancerous samples 71 percent of the time, and they were even better at identifying the samples that didn?t have cancer ? 93 percent of the time.

Now, if researchers can only pinpoint what compound is giving off the smell, they can develop some kind of sensor to do the jobs the dogs perform so well, since keeping a canine on standby in hospitals probably wouldn?t work so well.

Do you have a dog? If so, are you amazed by what he or she knows and can do?

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Source: http://healthyliving.ocregister.com/2011/08/23/dogs-can-smell-lung-cancer-on-a-patients-breath/37465/

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