Over the past ten years, myriad groundbreaking and progressive cancer treatments have been implemented in oncology departments everywhere. Whether the treatment involves some sort of chemotherapy, radiation or positive psychological therapy, more and more advances are being made to make sure cancer is detected and attacked as early as possible.What would at first appear to be completely unrelated to this is that dogs have a fantastic sense of smell [up to one third of a dog's brain is devoted solely to olfactory detection]. In light of this, recent studies have implied that dogs' senses of smell are good enough to sniff out cancer.
This may sound wild and wacky [I admit I had to reread the abstract three times just to make sure I was reading what I thought I was reading], but it's absolutely true. A recent article published in GUT posited that labrador retrievers that smelled the exhaled breath and watery stool samples of colorectal cancer (CRC) patients were able to identify even early cases of CRC extremely accurately.
In the study, Sonoda et al. exposed dogs highly trained in scent detection to the breath and stool samples of both CRC patients and normal, healthy subjects. For exhaled breath, the labradors had a detection sensitivity [compared to regular colonoscopy] of 0.91 and a specificity of 0.99. The sensitivity of the watery stool samples was even higher--0.97, and the specificity was 0.99. These measures were not confounded with inflammatory disease, benign colorectal disease or even current smoking behaviors.
Just one more reason to love animals! [if you need yet another, check out this cute and fuzzy video that has absolutely nothing to do with science]
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