Your canine friend can use its highly evolved sense of smell to pick out blood samples from people with cancer with almost 97 per cent accuracy, a finding that can lead to new low-cost and non-invasive screening approaches for the disease, finds a study.
Dogs have smell receptors 10,000 times more accurate than humans’, making them highly sensitive to odours we cannot perceive.
“Although there is no cure for cancer, early detection offers the best hope,” said lead researcher Heather Junqueira, at BioScentDx, a US-based healthcare company. ”
A highly sensitive test for detecting cancer could save thousands of lives and change the way the disease is treated,” he said.
For the study, the team used a form of clicker training to teach four beagles to distinguish between normal blood serum and samples from patients with malignant lung cancer.
