|
|
| | |
|
A New Way to Detect Lung Cancer? Dogs Can Sniff It Out
TIME Aug 18, 2011
They're man's best friend, but dogs, it turns out, may also be a doctor's newest secret weapon for detecting cancer.
German researchers report in the European Respiratory Journal
that dogs can be trained to detect lung cancer by sniffing human breath.
The scientists worked with an admittedly small number of canines — just
four, including two German shepherds, a Lab and an Australian shepherd —
but the dogs had good success. They were able to suss out cancer in 71
out of 100 breath samples from lung cancer patients, and were able to
correctly identify 93% of cancer-free samples, giving them an
impressively low rate of false positives.That's better than the imaging tests that most physicians currently use to detect lung cancer. WebMD reports
that in a recent study, longtime smokers who went in for annual CT
scans of their lungs cut their risk of dying from lung cancer by only
20%.
How does Fido do it? It's no secret that dogs have an acute and
sophisticated sense of smell, and the scientists believe the canines are
picking up on very subtle changes in certain volatile organic compounds
in the breath, which may change when cancer is present. (In the study,
patients exhaled into glass tubes filled with odor-capturing fleece, and
the dogs were given these to sniff.)
The dogs were also able to distinguish between patients with lung
cancer and those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, as well as
between smokers and nonsmokers.
| |
| | |
|
|
|