Dogs have an acute sense of smell. This could prove useful in the medical world, as researchers are finding that dogs can sniff out the markers of breast, colorectal, lung, and other types of cancer.
Humans have put dogs’ remarkable sense of smell to use by training them to sniff out explosives and narcotics. Their powerful noses can also detect viruses, bacteria, and signs of cancer in a person’s body or bodily fluids.
In this article, we look at the evidence behind dogs’ abilities to smell and identify different types of cancer, and how medical professionals can use dogs to help diagnose the condition.
Can dogs smell cancer?
Research suggests that dogs can detect many types of cancers in humans.
Like many other diseases, cancers leave specific traces, or odor signatures, in a person’s body and bodily secretions. Cancer cells, or healthy cells affected by cancer, produce and release these odor signatures. They detectTrusted Source these odors in substances called volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
Depending on the type of cancer, dogs are able to detect VOCs in a person’s:skin
Dogs can detect these odor signatures and, with training, alert people to their presence. People refer to dogs that undergo training to detect certain diseases as medical detection dogs.
Trained dogs can detect some substances in very low concentrations, as low as parts per trillion, which makes their noses sensitive enough to detect cancer markers in a person’s breath, urine, and blood.
Which types of cancer can a dog smell?
Research has shown that dogs can detect many types of cancer, such as:
For example, one case reportTrusted Source describes how a 75-year-old man visited a doctor after his dog licked persistently at a lesion behind the man’s ear.
The doctor performed diagnostic tests and confirmed malignant melanoma.
Nobody had trained this person’s dog specifically to detect cancer. However, most research studies into canine cancer detection involve teaching individual dogs to sniff out specific cancers.
Scientists have found evidence that some dogs can detect colorectal cancer from people’s breath and watery stool with high levels of accuracy, even for early-stage cancers. The presence of gut inflammation or noncancerous colorectal disease does not seem to affect dogs’ ability to detect these cancers.
Dogs may also detect lung cancer from a person’s breath. One studyTrusted Source found that a trained dog had a very high rate of accuracy in distinguishing between the breath of people with and without lung cancer.
In another studyTrusted Source, two dogs received training for 1 year. After this, researchers presented the dogs with a number of urine samples. The dogs proved 45–73% accurate in detecting lung cancer through the samples.
Dogs have also detectedTrusted Source ovarian cancer from blood samples and prostate cancer by sniffingTrusted Source a person’s urine.
In 2021, researchers reportedTrusted Source that a dog trained to detect signs of breast cancer in urine was able to detect breast cancer with 100% accuracy among urine samples from 200 people. Of these, 40 had breast cancer, 182 had other cancers, and 18 had no cancer. This study has yet to be repeated with a larger population of dogs to see if the outcomes can be reproduced.
One study found that dogs trained only to detect breast cancer were also able to detect melanoma and lung cancer. This suggests there may be a common odor signature across different types of cancer.
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