Dogs are “virtually on the verge of respectability” for disease detection. Yet without better understanding of what they are responding to, it will be impossible to develop a reliable screening test for lung cancer based on their abilities says Thorsten Walles, MD, of Schillerhoehe Hospital in Gerlingen, Germany.
Trained dogs can identify most patients with lung cancer by smelling their breath, researchers have now concluded. Dogs were given 100 breath samples from patients with biopsy-confirmed lung cancer to sniff, the dogs failed to flag only 29, reported Walles and his colleagues in the European Respiratory Journal. In 400 control samples from individuals without lung cancer, the canine sniff test gave false positives in only 28 cases. While the use of dogs to sniff out lung cancer was very exciting for the researchers they are more excited about the fact that human exhalations contain markers for lung cancer, which eventually may be detectable by more conventional means.
The dogs used in the current study were young family pets who were trained to lie down in front of tubes that contains lung cancer samples. In the group were two German shepherds, one Labrador retriever, and one Australian shepherd. During both the training and the subsequent testing phase, each sample was given to the dogs only once so that they would not simply learn to recognize individual participants’ characteristic odors.
To read more about how the test were conducted http://www.medpagetoday.com/HematologyOncology/LungCancer/28096
