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Dogs may be able to sniff out cancer Washington: Man's best friend, the dog, has given him unconditional love, support and companionship ever since the beginning of time. Now it seems that dogs are also turning into lifesavers, for researchers have found that the canine's keen sense of smell can detect both early and late stage lung and breast cancers. Though other scientific studies have documented the abilities of dogs to identify chemicals that are diluted as low as parts per trillion, the new study, led by Michael McCulloch of the Pine Street Foundation, California, and Tadeusz Jezierski of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Genetics and Animal Breeding, is the first to test whether dogs can detect cancers only by sniffing the exhaled breath of cancer patients.
As a part of the study, five household dogs were trained within a short
3-week period to detect lung or breast cancer by sniffing the breath of
cancer participants. The trial itself was comprised of 86 cancer patients
(55 with lung cancer and 31 with breast cancer) who had recently been
diagnosed with cancer through biopsy-confirmed conventional methods such
as a mammogram, or CAT scan and had not yet undergone any chemotherapy
treatment, and a control sample of 83 healthy patients. The results of
the study showed that the dogs were able to detect breast and lung cancer
with sensitivity and specificity between 88 percent and 97 percent. The
high accuracy persisted even after results were adjusted to take into
account whether the lung cancer patients were currently smokers. The study
also confirmed that the trained dogs could even detect the early stages
of lung cancer, as well as early breast cancer. The study, which was documented
by the BBC, will be published in the March 2006 issue of the journal Integrative
Cancer Therapies.
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