This is not the first time that dogs have been trained to sniff out illnesses. However, it is the first time that American scientists have announced an incredible success in using dogs to detect two types of cancer.
If a person has cancer, the air they exhale contains a collection of chemical compounds such as alkanes and benzene derivatives.
Scientists have long attempted to train dogs to detect specific scents in order to pave the way for new diagnostic methods. While previous efforts were not very successful, scientists from the Pine Street Foundation (California, USA) have recently reported in the journal Integrative Cancer Therapies a miraculous finding – the ability to accurately identify at least two types of cancer.
Within three weeks, the researchers trained five dogs to recognize air samples exhaled by cancer patients and healthy individuals.
The dogs were then tested with the breath of 55 lung cancer patients, 31 breast cancer patients, and 83 healthy individuals. The results were astonishing: the dogs accurately identified 99% of the lung cancer patients’ breath, while the accuracy for breast cancer reached 88% across all cases. Remarkably, the dogs only misidentified 2% of healthy individuals as having the disease, even in early stages of illness.
The researchers themselves acknowledged that the probability of accurate diagnosis is significantly higher compared to CT scans and X-rays.
The distinctive odors associated with cancer patients arise from abnormal metabolic processes in cancer cells.
As early as 1989, scientists in the journal The Lancet noted that dogs could be used to detect skin cancer. In 2004, their British colleagues reported success in training dogs to identify bladder cancer through the scent of urine. However, this method was only accurate up to 41%.
Integrative Cancer Therapies, The Lancet
