Can a sniffer dog spot if I’ve got cancer?
A Mail writer’s extraordinary experiment
AS I lIStENED on the radio to a gloomy report about the incidence of prostate cancer rising in middle-aged men, I rushed to the internet (again) to check the symptoms. My worst fears were confirmed. Prostate cancer cells can spread to the bones and cause a dull persistent ache in the lower back. As I’d been nursing a back pain for several weeks, I was convinced that, at the age of 54, I’d become yet another bleak NhS statistic.
I was unwilling even to entertain the idea that the backache was caused by overzealous exercise in the gym.
there was a loud sigh down the telephone when I spoke to my long-suffering GP to demand a prostate cancer test.
Until I was 50, he rarely saw or heard from me. I’d been fit as a fiddle all my life. But then my vision deteriorated so I had both eyes lasered. then, after becoming breathless walking up and down stairs in 2013, I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, an irregular, often abnormally fast heartbeat.
It was fixed after two sessions of electric shock treatment, but it’s since become erratic again. I’m now on blood-thinning pills to limit the risk of a stroke from the blood sitting around in my heart and forming a clot.
After my call about the back pain, my GP, who now tests me every year for prostate cancer, agreed to my having another Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) blood test. this is used to determine with a biopsy if men need further investigation.
the result came back clear, but I wasn’t satisfied. My internet research revealed there is a high ‘false positive’ rate with the test. Sometimes, three in four men are wrongly diagnosed as having the cancer. Ever the pessimist, I assumed that in my case I had incorrectly been given the all-clear.
A few days later, over dinner at Westminster, where I have spent much of my journalistic career, I sat next to Betsy Duncan Smith, wife of Work and Pensions Secretary Iain.
Several years ago, I interviewed Iain for the Mail and he described the terrible moment in 2009 when Betsy told him she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. ‘I was stunned,’ he told me.
he effectively ran his ministerial operation from the family home in Buckinghamshire so he could look after the mother of his four children, whom he married in 1982.
After two years, which included gruelling bouts of chemotherapy in which she lost all her hair, Betsy was declared cancer-free.
Shortly afterwards, Betsy was persuaded to go to see the work of a new charity called Medical Detection Dogs. the charity has more than 20 dogs trained to sniff out evidence of breast, prostate and bladder cancer from batches of breath or urine samples. they do a day’s work at the centre, then go home to lead a normal life.
From never wanting even to think about cancer again, Betsy, daughter of the fifth lord Cottesloe of Fremantle, became a trustee of the charity. She is now so involved, she fosters one of the sniffer dogs, a cocker spaniel named Jobi.
over dinner, she told me about what the charity has achieved. A true politician’s wife, by the main course she’d persuaded me to see the work for myself.
After 35 years as a journalist, I was, to say the least, naturally sceptical. But if my PSA result was wrong and I had cancer, as I feared, could a sniffer dog detect it?
As I arrived at the charity’s hQ, — an office which looks like a hut plus a Portakabin in the Buckinghamshire countryside — a black labrador raced across the fields to greet me and repeatedly buried his face in my stomach. I was alarmed: had he caught a whiff of cancer? he was just very friendly, I was told.
the charity is only researching the use of sniffer dogs for cancer at this stage, so my sample couldn’t strictly speaking be ‘tested’.
But it would be one of a number of other ‘healthy’ samples that would be used in the training of the dogs, along with one sample from a patient known to have prostate cancer. If my PSA result was wrong, and I, too, had cancer, the dog would theoretically spot this as well as the ‘genuine’ sample.
Midas, aged four, a delightful wire-haired hungarian Vizsla, was going to check the samples, each contained in a 1ml pot. they were attached to a carousel in the training room (each sample was put on a ‘paddle’, or flat plate, at the end of one the carousel ‘arms’). Midas then sniffed the samples in turn, in two demonstrations before my sample was added to the other seven.
In barely a second she sat down and was pawing just one sample — the correct one. Midas had given my sample a clean bill of health. Betsy, who was watching, said: ‘our dogs are quicker and cheaper than machines. Dogs are used to detect explosives, so why can’t we use them in the NhS?’
A research programme with 900 prostate cancer patients in Milan, which was reported in the Journal of Urology, revealed a 98 per cent success rate with medical sniffer dogs.
Medical Detection Dogs is now working on a three-year study with Milton Keynes University hospital after an initial study showed specially trained dogs can detect prostate tumours in urine samples in 93 per cent of cases. the new trial will assess samples from 3,000 patients to check for prostate cancer, as well as kidney and bladder tumours. At the end of the study, the charity hopes to be given permission to take referrals from GPs or private practices. Patients won’t be able to self-refer. the charity is run by Dr Claire Guest, a psychologist and animal behaviourist, whose paper in the British Medical Journal in 2004 was the first to suggest cancer had an odour which could be detected by dogs in samples of urine. She set up the Medical Detection Dogs charity in 2008 on a shoestring budget with donations from well-wishers. then, a year later, Claire was taking her three dogs for their evening walk when her usually placid labrador Daisy refused to leave the back of her car. Instead Daisy repeatedly nuzzled her in the chest. Claire felt the spot and detected a lump. her doctor referred her to a specialist and tests showed that behind the lump — which itself was a harmless cyst —there was a deep-seated growth, which could have been fatal had it not been detected early. ‘I’d never have known it was there,’ says Claire.
She underwent a lumpectomy and her lymph nodes were removed; she also had six weeks of radiotherapy.
Six years on, the charity Claire set up is now the world leader in its field. And through her connections Betsy Duncan Smith has brought in, among others, Jeremy hunt, the health Secretary, who has been to see the dogs.
After a private visit in February 2013, the Duchess of Cornwall is now a patron of the charity — Claire has since done a presentation with the dogs at Clarence house.
yet despite the support of Charles and Camilla, the charity is desperately short of cash. Even the chair and desk Claire works from are hand-me-downs. ‘Britain has one of the worst rates of early cancer detection in Europe,’ says Claire, who is convinced the dogs have a significant role to play.
As she explains: ‘humans have five million sensory perceptions, dogs have 300 million, which is why they have such an extraordinary sense of smell. they can detect parts per trillion — that’s the equivalent of one drop of blood in four olympic-sized swimming pools.’
the dogs are already saving the NhS a small fortune in their work with diabetes patients. For as well as training dogs to detect cancer from samples, the charity has trained other dogs to warn their owners of a life-threatening medical alert, such as a drop in blood sugar levels.
At the centre I met Carolyn Gatenby who has ‘brittle’ (or hard to control) type 1 diabetes.
She used to have to test her blood sugar levels 20 times a day as she suffers from hypo-unawareness, where someone with diabetes doesn’t notice the warning signs of dropping blood sugar levels, such as feeling weak or confused. this can be fatal, especially in children.
‘My parents lived near me and would telephone every morning. If I didn’t answer they would come to my house,’ says Carolyn, 55, who lives in Buckingham. ‘Sometimes I’d already slipped into a coma and they’d have to call an ambulance. I was a regular at the hospital.’
After her parents died six years ago, Carolyn was given Simba, a black labrador. When Simba was two, Carolyn asked the Medical Detection Dogs charity to train her.
Even as Carolyn was talking to me, Simba became agitated, repeatedly pushing against her leg. Carolyn’s sugar levels were dropping.
After Carolyn tested her blood and injected herself, Simba promptly went to sleep by her feet. ‘Simba has kept me alive and I never have to go into hospital any more,’ says Carolyn.
the 65 dogs trained at the centre to help patients with diabetes often alert parents in the night if their child’s blood sugar level has fallen. And they can retrieve sugary drinks for their owner.
So will the NhS give its blessing to the work? ‘I was really impressed with what I saw,’ Mr hunt told us, while his spokesman added: ‘Both we and NhS England will look very closely at the outcome of the [Milton Keyes] trials.’
As for my bad back, it was nothing serious: it was caused by overdoing it at the gym after all.