Which lab is better at detecting cancer: a laboratory or a Labrador retriever?
Consider Tsunami, a regal-looking German shepherd with attentive eyes and an enthusiastic tail wag for her trainer friends. University of Pennsylvania researchers say she is more than 90 percent successful in identifying the scent of ovarian cancer in tissue samples, opening a new window on a disease with no effective test for early detection that kills 14,000 Americans a year. When found early, there’s a five-year survival rate of over 90 percent.
With 220 million olfactory cells in a canine nose, compared with 50 million for humans, dogs have long helped in search-and-rescue missions. Now, growing evidence supports their possible use by clinicians. The largest study on cancer-sniffing dogs found they can detect prostate cancer by smelling urine samples with 98 percent accuracy. At least one application is in the works seeking U.S. approval of a kit using breath samples to find breast cancer.
“Our study demonstrates the use of dogs might represent in the future a real clinical opportunity if used together with common diagnostic tools,” said Gian Luigi Taverna, the author of the prostate cancer research reported Sunday at the American Urological Association in Boston.
While smaller studies have long shown dogs can sniff out a range of illnesses, the question of whether they can be used on a large-scale basis has drawn skepticism. Questions remain on whether one type of dog is better than another, how to systematize their use and the financial viability of any such system. As a result, most current research is looking at how to copy the canine abilty to smell disease either with a machine or a chemical test.