Dogs Smelling Cancer

Dogs Smelling Cancer

You know how much I love animals, right? By now, y’all know my beloved Buzz, a “career redirected” seeing eye dog. He was my constant companion when I had FBC. When I was sick, he was the ultimate in pet therapy.  When I was in the bottomless pit of chemo despair, I did restorative yoga (which basically this consisted of my laying down and resting my legs on a chair!). I’ll always remember my instructor saying, “I have never seen a dog who is more like a shaman than Buzz.”  She was so.completely.right.on. And then after my hysterectomy last fall, he didn’t leave my side for a second. Well — truth be told, he actually did check out when it was feeding time. He is a lab after all!

There are days when I look over at Buzz and he is just staring at me with eyes that say, “I love you more than anything in the world. You are the greatest thing ever created. I am the luckiest dog to be with you.” And then – of course – I have to stop what I am doing and get on the ground and smooch and snuggle with him.  I swear that I get more love, strength and support from him than I could ever dream of or hope for!

In addition to serving as the greatest therapists in the world, here is another interesting and pretty astounding fact about dogs: they can smell parts per trillion! WTF does this mean? you wonder. Well, if you were to put one drop of blood into a swimming pool that was the size of 20 olympic sized pools, a dog would be able to smell the blood in the pool with ease. Yup. I told you it was astounding!

Over the years humans have been able to train dogs to sniff narcotics, missing persons, gun powder, and now the Silver Lining is that they are being trained to detect diseases!

 I know, I know, you’re wondering: “Does cancer even have a smell?” Well actually it does. Some oncologists will tell you that humans can smell stage 3-4 cancer through their breath (&%$*!). If humans can smell cancer in its later stages then dogs DEFINITELY can smell it in its early stages.

The thing of it is though:  it is much more difficult to train dogs to smell diseases because disease scents cannot be isolated like drugs and gun powder can. Dogs have to be trained to ignore all of the other compound smells along side the cancer scent such as healthy breath and other noncancerous diseases. This means that ALOT of samples have to be used for the dogs training including disease controls, healthy breath, and cancer samples with specifics on the stage of the cancer sample.

According to an interesting  New York Times article, Charlie Johnson, a professor at Penn State, is in the process of creating a hand-held sensor that can detct cancer chemical in clinics. In theory, the device will be programmed to detect the isolated cancer compounds that dogs are singling out. F’ing amazing, if you ask me.

While there is still so much research and training being done,  the Silver Lining is that dogs DO have the capability to smell cancer and, with more refinement, they could potentially be a  lifesaver in ways beyond our wildest imagination!

Here is a video of a woman who noticed that her dog was not acting normal for some time. Little did she know that her dog had detected her breast cancer way before her doctors did!

Check it out: