Dogs ‘able to smell prostate cancer in 98% of cases’
Elephants spray tourists with water as part of the Songkran water festival in Thailand’s Ayutthaya province, north of Bangkok, on Friday. Songkran, the most celebrated festival of the year, marks the start of Thailand’s traditional New Year DOGS can detect prostate cancer in men almost every single time, “spectacular” research has found.
Tests showed that dogs correctly detected the killer disease in 98% of cases after sniffing the urine of men.
Experts hailed the findings and called for more support for the “tested, time-old” technique.
Dr Claire Guest, co-founder of Medical Detection Dogs, a Buckinghamshire, UK, chari- ty, said: “These results are spectacular. They offer us further proof that dogs can detect human cancer.
“It is particularly exciting that we have such a high success rate in the detection of prostate cancer, for which the existing tests are woefully inadequate.”
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK, with more than 40 000 cases diagnosed every year.
The Italian study involved two German shepherd dogs sniffing the urine of 900 men — 360 with prostate cancer and 540 without. Scientists from the Department of Urology at the Humanitas Clinical and Research Centre in Milan found one dog got it right in 98.7% of cases, while the other was correct in 97.6% of cases.
They said the dogs were able to detect specific volatile organic compounds in the urine, but said an important question remained of how a dog would find it in daily practice.
The conclusions echoed similar, previous research by Guest who found a 93% reliability rate.
Guest said there was a “reluctance to embrace this tested, time-old technology”, but dogs could pick up a scent in a dilution of one part to 1 000.
There is no single test for prostate cancer, but the most commonly used are blood tests, a physical examination or biopsy.
Medical Detection Dogs, which is based in Milton Keynes, trains specialist canines to detect the odour of human disease.
It also trains Medical Alert Assistance dogs to help people with life-threatening health conditions go about their daily lives.
The charity said last year it would do trials on whether dogs could detect breast cancer in women. — © The Daily Telegraph, London