Dogs are considered to be “man’s best friend” and for many reasons, they love unconditionally, make great comfort keepers and companions, they don’t talk back and some even fetch newspapers and slippers, not to mention they are
Dogs are considered to be “man’s best friend” and for many reasons, they love unconditionally, make great comfort keepers and companions, they don’t talk back and some even fetch newspapers and slippers, not to mention they are our fur babies and treasured members of our families, but did you know that dogs can detect cancer in the body even up to a year before it is detected by humans?
That’s a fact, as a dog’s olfactory abilities are incredibly accurate.
“Doctors and Scientists are taking a closer look at disease detection through the “eyes” of the canine nose.”
Dog smelling receptors are 25 times more powerful than humans, with an ability of 100,000 times greater. Humans rely upon their visual cortex for reasoning, logic and decision making, and dogs rely on their olfactory cortex which is about 40 times larger than humans, that being said, their olfactory bulb has a large number of smell sensitive receptors, with a range between 125 to 220 million, which is a hundred thousand to a million times more reactive than that of humans.
Research proves that trained lab dogs were able to pick out blood samples from cancer patients with 97 percent accuracy.
“Dogs powerful noses have 300 million sensors compared with a humans 5 million. In addition, dogs have a second smelling device in the backs of their noses that we don’t have, called Jacobson’s organ.”
So how do they detect cancer? Many different studies of dogs with their cancer detection noses are due to the fact that cancerous cells release different metabolic waste products than healthier cells within the human body.
Dogs possess the ability to detect the earliest stages of cancer because of the chemical traces in the range of parts per trillion.
Dogs can detect cancerous cells through a humans breath, as impossible as this may sound, studies have confirmed they can detect skin cancer melanoma by sniffing skin lesions and researchers have also proven dogs can detect prostate cancer by smelling the patients urine.
In Europe, researchers have trained some dogs to detect many various types of cancer, those being, bladder cancer, skin, lung, prostate, bowl, ovarian, endometrial, and cervical cancers. Scientist and researchers are certain that the near future of medical cancer detection will include mans best friend as an important instrument in early cancer detection.
These trained dogs will become an integrated part of future patient care as they will be working in laboratories where the gas chromatographs could be utilized to isolate specific compounds identified by dogs.
Other recent developments include a breathalyzer that can change color according to the compounds in the breath indicating the presence of cancer.
The challenge now is how to replicate these studies as scientist figure out how to translate dogs diagnostic skills into clinically useful and standardized protocols that can be scaled up from study samples of a few dozen or hundreds to the millions who are screened for cancer each year.
Cynthia M. Otto, DVM, PhD, director of the Universi