Dogs, Cancer Detection and Tech!

Talk about Woman’s Best Friend!!! As a Holistic Cancer Specialist and Canine Nutritionist (PNCC) we love to share stories like this!

An article published out of the UK shares insights on one woman’s journey to train dogs to spot and detect Cancer and other diseases early on.

Back in 2008, Claire Guest started training dogs to detect the odor of bladder cancer… from her dining room. Now she starts to train them at 8 weeks with scent and treat training. As an animal behaviorist, she had read about the science and heard enough stories to believe dogs’ snouts, which have hundreds of millions of olfactory receptors (220 Million to be exact - humans typically have just a few million), could track diseases. So she took samples from volunteers and people she knew to run tests.

“Even though it was a small-scale study, it was obvious the dogs could do it very reliably,” Gemma Butlin, head of communications and people engagement at Guest’s UK-based research organization and charity Medical Detection Dogs, told Healthcare Brew.

The end goal is to build an e-nose that can detect early stage diseases for each patient when they arrive at the waiting room. At this stage, Butlin said, dogs are not meant to replace more traditional testing but instead be a first line of screening to help patients realize they may need to see a doctor.

“All of our work is geared toward early diagnosis,” Butlin said. “The earlier you can get checked out for these things, the better your survival rate is.”