Dogs Detecting Cancer

Dogs Detecting Cancer

The idea that people can train dogs to sniff out cancer in a human has fascinated me ever since I read a magazine article from National Geographic in the waiting room of my doctor's office. My whole life I have had dogs, and I have always known that they are very inelegant animals, but the fact that people can train them to find something like cancer in humans just by the distinct smell is truly amazing to me. I do not remember the exact contents of the article, but it was about a professor that had trained drug dogs and hoped to begin training dogs in the near future to detect prostate cancer in men. At the time, I was working in a hospital on a surgical recovery floor where we had many male patients that suffered from prostate cancer, and many of them would have lived longer if they had early detection. This is actually the case with any type of cancer and if dogs can detect it even a day before doctors that would be great.

The study of a dog being able to detect cancer by smell is still a fairly new concept and is far from being an accurate science. However, the idea that a dog could detect cancer was introduced in 1989 when a woman went to the dermatologist and asked to have a mole removed because here dog would sniff at that one and none of the rest of them. After having that mole removed, it was found that the mole was cancerous, and the dog left the area alone (Ross 2).

There are many articles that can be found on studies that are under way to see if the dogs can detect cancer. What I would like to find out is how they train the dogs to do this, if one breed of dog is better then another, where they are in their research with dogs detecting cancer, and what they plan to do with the research they have collected so far. It seems simple to me put a dog in every clinic and lab, and let them sniff samples. If the police can use them to find bombs and drugs than medical professionals should be able to use them to detect cancer.

Dogs are trained to sniff out many different smells for humans. It is not known why their sense of smell is so much better than that of humans, but what it comes down to is they have more receptors in their nose and more neurons that help transport the information that those receptors collect to the brain. Research has also shown that dogs have a larger area of their brain that is dedicated to the detection and differentiation of different smells. This is why it is estimated that their sense of smell in anywhere from ten to one hundred thousand times better then ours (Roach 1-2).

About six years ago a woman named Nancy Best's dog Mia pounced at her right breast, and then continued to do that many times over the next few days. The last time she did it with enough force to make Nancy feel that area of her breast. When Nancy felt was a lump and went to the doctor where she was diagnosed with stage II breast cancer (Cohen 1). This is only one of several stories that can be found on the Internet and in medical journals. Some of the articles date back as far as 1989. In another case, a man had eczema for over eighteen years, and at one point, the dog began sniffing one eczema patch that was on his leg. It was later found that the man had developed cancer in that area. Once the cancer was removed, the dog stopped sniffing at the area (Ross 2).

In 2004, there was a study published in which dogs picked out urine samples from patients with bladder cancer. In the study, urine samples from patients with cancer were set next to samples taken from patient without cancer. In the study, the dogs did not have great accuracy, but the 41 percent that they did have was better then the anticipated 14 percent that was expected by chance alone (Cohen 1). In this study the researcher took all six of his pet dogs, "three working strain cocker spaniels, one Papillion, one Labrador, and a mongrel." The dogs were trained over a seven-month period to sniff different urine samples and to ignore the difference in smells associated with age, sex, diet and other factors. Then, they were introduced to urine samples from patients with bladder cancer and also urine samples from healthy patients (Ross 2).

Now scientist and researchers have the task of understanding what the dogs are detecting and trying to understand, because it is not a realistic idea to have a canine companion for every doctor in the United States. In one of the most recent studies conducted by Michael