The Lifesaving Nose

How the medical profession is using dogs’ fantastic sense of smell to sniff out cancer…

It’s well-known that a dog’s sense of smell is vastly superior to that of a human. People have been harnessing that ability for centuries in everything from tracking to drug and explosives detection. Now, though, that remarkable sense of smell is being used in the fight against cancer.

In 2006, the Pine Street Foundation in the US published a study showing that it was possible for dogs to identify patients with lung and breast cancer based on breath samples. Now, the foundation is training dogs to literally sniff out early stage ovarian cancer. This is a critical development, because that cancer, which kills over 22,000 women a year in the US alone, is often only detected in the very early stages.

Does cancer smell?

The question of whether cancer has a specific spell is precisely what the researchers hope to answer. If it does, dogs are ideally placed to detect it, having been used for years to pick up the scent of diabetics on the verge of hypoglycaemia.

However, according to Dr Mortimer O’Connor of Victory University Hopsital in Cork, Ireland, it may not simply be a dog’s fantastic sense of smell that enables it to detect medical problems. Dr O’Connor believes they may also taste a difference on a person’s skin or even sense changes in the electric or magnetic energy the body emits.

The research is still very much in its infancy, but the early signs are encouraging. If the use of dogs enables doctors to prove that cancer does indeed have a specific smell, mechanical detectors can be developed to pick it up, potentially saving many thousands of lives.

According to Nicholas Broffman, executive director of the Pine Street Foundation, dogs can detect scents as small as one part per trillion. That, he says, is the equivalent of a drop of ink in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. ‘No scent-detection device on the planet can come close to that,’ he says.

So it looks like man’s best friend has just become even more useful to us.

Images by:Lisas Lounge and scienceblog