There a number of reasons to love dogs. Apart from their companionship and loyalty, dogs also render emotional support to people on stressful days. They can also discover hidden drugs, bombs and medical conditions in humans such as seizure. Apart from this, they play a vital role in detecting cancer in humans.
The science about dog’s sniffing
As per the breed of the dog, the nose of a dog has 125 to 300 million scent glands in comparison to human’s nose with just 5 million scent glands. It simply means that a dog is capable to detect even the smallest odor created by any disease.
How does a dog acts when they smell cancer?
The capability of a dog to smell melanoma, a skin cancer has been previously confirmed. Dogs have been seen to sniff and lick melanoma samples through the early cancer detection kit and prompted the owners to detect the cancerous sites and get medical attention. Dogs have also been seen to detect canine olfactory cancer.
Dogs can detect depending on the type of the cancer through breath, sweat, urine, skin as well as feces. However, they need proper training for it. Once the sample is placed on the early cancer detection kit, the dog will smell it.
Can you train dogs to detect cancer?
Cancer screening dogs can detect several types of cancers. Till now dogs have detected:
- Breast cancer as well as lung cancer by sniffing the patient’s breathes. The dogs found biochemical differences in the patient’s exhales which led to the diagnosis of the cancer.
- Prostrate and bladder cancer by sensing the urine of the patients.
- Cervical cancer by sniffing the biopsy samples of the patient.
- Ovarian cancer by sniffing the blood and tumor samples of the patient.
- Colorectal cancer by sensing the exhalation of the patient and their stool sample.
Though dogs have a good sense of smell, but they need to be trained for this task. Because of their accuracy, cancer screening dogs are being used more and more. They have good cancer detection ability and can diagnose several types of cancer without any invasive procedure. Cancer detection by dogs is a cost-effective, simple and non-invasive procedure. It is the best alternative method to detect cancer with 97% accuracy. So, the next time you need to get yourself checked in case of cancer, rather than picking an invasive and costly procedure, go for cancer screening dogs.