Detecting cancer early can save lives, and now it seems thereÔÇÖs a new method of detecting the disease that can be more successful at detection than laboratories themselves.
A German Shepherd named Tsunami, at the University of Pennsylvania, has a 90 percent success rate in identifying ovarian cancer in tissue samples just by the smell, sitting down when she identifies cancer in a sample. WhatÔÇÖs more impressive is that there is currently no effective test for this kind of early detection in any lab.
This kind of super-human detection can be put down to the fact that dogs have 220 million olfactory cells in their nose, compared to only 50 million for humans. Canines have long been used for help in search and rescue missions, and now thereÔÇÖs increased support of use of dogs by clinicians with studies showing cancer-sniffing dogs can detect prostate cancer by smelling urine samples with 98 percent accuracy.
Gian Luigi Taverna, author of the prostate cancer research, said ÔÇÿOur study demonstrated the use of dogs might represent in the future a real clinical opportunity if used together with common diagnostic toolsÔÇÖ.
Questions still exist regarding whether the use of dogs to sniff out illness is realistic and feasible, with queries particularly being raised over the financial viability, and whether one type of dog is better than another. Therefore, most current research is looking into how to copy the canine ability to smell disease, in order to produce a chemical test or machine to do the work of the dogs.
That being said, this method of literally ÔÇ£sniffing outÔÇØ cancer would be non invasive for both the patient and the dog; and in the case of prostate cancer, from the results obtained by the study, would have a higher successful detection rate. Currently the PSA tests for prostate cancer give false positives for the disease as much as 80 percent of the time.
In sniffing out the cancer, these dogs are detecting chemicals emitted by a tumor ÔÇô Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). These compounds can be found in the urine of prostate cancer patients, as well as the breath of lung cancer and colon cancer patients.
Training a dog to identify these VOCs takes about six weeks and people such as Dina Zaphiris, a nationally recognized dog trainer, and Jeffrey Marks, an associate professor of surgery and pathology at Duke University, are working to get dogs involved in medical care.
Zaphiris has even said sheÔÇÖs received emails from people, including one woman in particular who, having received an unclear mammogram and being unsure of whether she wanted a biopsy, was hoping that a trained dog would be available to screen her breath sample.
Although there is obvious support for the use of dogs in cancer detection by both professional and potential patients, questions still surround their feasibility and use. Current and future research is focussed on producing a machine to duplicate the incredible sense of smell of such dogs.
Jack Di Francesco
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