More proof that dogs are great!

[JTF]

Dogs can sniff out cancer, say researchers
Pooches identify illness from urine Sense of smell

is vastly superior


EMMA ROSS
ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON—A London woman asked doctors back in 1989 to removed a mole on her leg because her dog, a female border collie-Doberman mix, would constantly sniff at it, and had tried to bite it off.

It turned out she had malignant melanoma — a deadly form of skin cancer. It was caught early enough to save her life.

It has long been suspected that man's best friend has a special ability to sense when something is wrong with us. Now the first experiment to verify that scientifically has demonstrated that dogs are able to smell cancer.

Experts say it's unlikely that pooches will become practical partners in cancer detection any time soon, but the results of the study, outlined this week in the British Medical Journal, are promising.

They show that when urine from bladder cancer patients was set out among samples from healthy people or those with other diseases, the dogs — all ordinary pets — were able to identify the cancer patients' urine almost three times more often than would be expected by chance alone.

"The issue is not whether or not they can detect cancer, because clearly they can. The issue is whether you can set up a system whereby they can communicate with you. That requires further ingenuity," said Tim Cole, a professor of medical statistics at Imperial College in London, who was unconnected with the study.

David Neal, a bladder and prostate cancer surgeon at Cambridge University, said it's plausible dogs might be able to pick up the scent of cancer because people with the disease shed abnormal proteins in their urine.

"I'm skeptical about whether it will be implementable, but scientifically it should be followed up," said Neal, a spokesman for Cancer Research UK, who was not involved in the research. "It might be that the dogs are better than our current machines at picking up abnormal proteins in the urine. What are the dogs picking up? Can we get a machine that does the same?"

It is thought that a dog's sense of smell is generally 10,000 to 100,000 times better than a human's.

The idea that dogs may be able to smell cancer was first put forward in 1989 by two London dermatologists, who described the case of the woman and the border collie-Doberman mix.

The dog would constantly sniff at the mole, even through her trousers, but ignore all her other moles. One day, it tried to bite the mole off when the woman was wearing shorts.

A handful of similar anecdotes have since been reported, but the latest study is the first rigorous test of the theory to be published.

The experiment, conducted by researchers at Amersham Hospital in Buckinghamshire, and the organization Hearing Dogs for Deaf People, set out to prove whether dogs could be trained to detect cancer.



Urine from 36 bladder cancer patients and 108 comparison volunteers was used. Taken as a group, the six dogs correctly selected the right urine on 22 out of 54 occasions, giving an average success rate of 41 per cent. By chance alone, you'd expect them to be accurate 14 per cent, of the time.

One of the cancer patients was identified correctly by all six dogs, whereas two others were consistently missed, indicating that perhaps the strength of the urine signal varies from person to person, or according to severity of the disease.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding, though, was in a comparison patient whose urine was used during the training phase. All the dogs unequivocally identified that urine as a cancer case, even though screening tests before the experiment had shown no cancer.

Doctors conducted more detailed tests on the patient and found a life-threatening tumour in the right kidney.

[Jennifer]

JTF,
Just one more amazing talent to add to the list---love this!!They can also detect a heart attack BEFORE it happens...whoa...