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Your Dog Can Smell Cancer On You: Unusual Sniffs Saved Some Patient’s Lives

Your Dog Can Smell Cancer On You: Unusual Sniffs Saved Some Patient’s Lives
Research has shown that with some amount of training, dogs can help detect these cancer signature scents and alert people to their presence

Seeing her dog sniffing at a particular area of nose repeatedly, she was able to sense some trouble with the spot and headed to her dermatologist. She was later diagnosed with skin cancer

Written by Kashish Sharma |Updated : October 6, 2022 10:29 AM IST

Dogs have always been man's best friend. It won't be an exaggeration to say that they walk by our side in both sickness and health. Growing medical evidence is suggesting that our canine friends can smell cancer on us. Dogs have a very sensitive sense of smell. Studies and isolated incidents have shown that dogs can detect many kinds of cancer in the body.

Like many other diseases, cancers leave specific traces, or scent signatures in a person's body and bodily secretions. Studies have shown that dogs have a highly elevated sense of smell and are found to sniff the disease. Research has shown that with some amount of training, dogs can help detect these cancer signature scents and alert people to their presence.

Her dog sniffed at her nose repeatedly

In 2018, a woman named Lauren Gauthier shared with media how her dog Victoria detected her skin cancer and potentially saved her life. Gauthier had shared how the little canine kept sniffing at the small red bump she had developed on her nose. Seeing the dog sniffing at a particular area of nose repeatedly, Gauthier was able to sense some trouble with the spot and headed to her dermatologist. Following a biopsy, she was diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer.

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His dog would continue licking his ear

This case study goes back to 2013 when the pet of a 75-year-old Caucasian man was reportedly licking at a lesion right behind his ear. The patient had a history of significant sun exposure and had suffered from eczema as an adolescent. Later the doctor performed diagnostic tests on him and confirmed malignant melanoma.

These pets weren't trained

Studies over the past decades have shown that trained dogs can identify the urine of patients with bladder cancer almost three times more often than would be expected by chance detection and detected lung cancer in exhaled breath samples with high accuracy. There are also studies that showed that trained dogs could also detect ovarian cancer from blood samples and prostate cancer from sniffing a person's urine. In the cases mentioned above, these pets weren't trained to detect cancer and alerted the owner most naturally.

Can detect cancer with 97% accuracy

A study presented at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology during the 2019 Experimental Biology meeting showed that that dogs can use their highly evolved sense of smell to pick out blood samples from people with cancer with almost 97 percent accuracy. The results could lead to new cancer-screening approaches that are inexpensive and accurate without being invasive.

Man's best friend can save him from prostate cancer

A team of urologists and other experts at John Hopkins Hospital have been studying a dog's extremely sensitive smell as a diagnostic tool for prostate cancer. The researchers had two dogs sniff samples of urine from men diagnosed with high-grade prostate cancer and from men without cancer. The results showed that both the dogs identified five of seven urine samples from men with cancer with an accuracy rate of 71.4 per cent. Some studies have also shown that in a bunch of urine samples, dogs can even distinguish aggressive prostate cancer from its intermediate form.

Last word

Dogs can have smell receptors 10,000 times more accurate than human beings. This makes them highly sensitive to scents and odours that we can't perceive. While dogs can't tell what exactly they smell on you but shrugging off their unusual behaviour might not be the right thing to do. If your pet starts paying close attention to a body part, it might be a good decision to get it checked.