Here is how dogs detect cancer, study confirms

The traditional role of a dog is to give a man security in his homestead and was considered as a domestic animal.

With the time change, dogs have been used as pets and keeping a man company.

That is different. A new study has revealed that dogs can smell cancer in blood samples with 97% accuracy.

Researchers from BioScentDx carried out the study, and hope the findings could lead to new approaches for cancer-screening, international media reports.

Heather Junqueira, who led the study, said: “Although there is currently no cure for cancer, early detection offers the best hope of survival.

“A highly sensitive test for detecting cancer could potentially save thousands of lives and change the way the disease is treated.”

In the study, the team used a special form of clicker trainer to teach four beagles to distinguish between normal blood samples and blood samples from people with lung cancer.

One beagle was unmotivated to perform (aren’t we all sometimes), but the other three dogs correctly identified the cancer samples with 97% accuracy.

“One is using canine scent detection as a screening method for cancers, and the other would be to determine the biologic compounds the dogs detect and then design cancer-screening tests based on those compounds,”
Heather Junqueira added.

Could this be a step ahead in detecting early cancer?