Dogs can smell cancer
27 September 2004
by Richard
Conan-Davies
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Dogs have a pretty good sense of smell in fact about 100,000 times better than ours so it may come as no surprise that dogs may be able to sniff out the tell tale smells of cancer. Well it's not exactly the cancer but the chemicals or proteins that cancers produce that dogs may be able to smell. In research reported in the British Medical Journal led by Dr. Carolyn Willis ther team trained six dogs to sniff out different urine samples to see if the dogs could correctly identify samples that had the bladder cancer. The results showed they could indeed sniff out the cancer samples much more frequently than if by chance only. This research suggests that dogs could be used to help diagnose certain kinds of cancers or to at least add to more comprehesive test or just routine preliminary screenings for cancers. |
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