Butt-sniffing cancer fighters
The sniffer of the average canine just might be the most useful weapon in the fight against cancer ever discovered by scientists. I knew the dog’s nose was amazing, but never knew just how amazing until Japanese researchers uncovered a quirk about specially-trained cancer-sniffing dogs. When given the breath or stool of a person, dogs could sniff out people with colorectal cancer. Add that to the list of cancers dogs can detect with just the power of their noses. Cancer-sniffing dogs can also detect cancers of the prostate, skin, lungs, breasts, ovaries, and bladder by smelling a person’s breath (or urine). The dog’s nose was so powerful it could even detect early-stage cancer, which means dogs may save lives.
“In the future, studies designed to identify cancer-specific volatile organic compounds will be important for the development of new methods for the early detection of CRC [colorectal cancer],” the Japanese researchers wrote in an article published in Gut, a medical journal.
The goal of the researchers now is to take what they’ve learned about the dog’s sense of smell and develop some sort of artificial nose to detect the compounds in breath and waste that give off the cancer indicators. It takes many years to train a cancer-sniffing dog, so perhaps by isolating those compounds that the dog smells, scientists can develop an artificial nose to sniff out cancer without exposing man’s best friend to man’s bodily fluids. Still, your breath is a powerful weapon in the fight to cure cancer, just like your finger length and your DNA.
Tags: dogs can smell cancer on a person, dogs can smell cancer in human waste, dogs can smell cancer in poop, colorectal cancer, dogs can smell colorectal cancer in a person’s stool, unusual health news, cancer, detecting cancer, dogs can be trained to detect cancer, Gut
