Dog detects cancer - even in their earliest stages
Published: November 8, 2005
Last year a British project, the Amersham bladder cancer study, published a report in the British Medical Journal from a team at Amersham hospital, Buckinghamshire, that had trained dogs to detect cancer from urine to an accuracy rate of 41%.
This figure, low though it sounds, suggested that the dogs in the trial were correctly identifying urine samples at a three times greater-than-chance rate; one Amersham dog achieved 60% accuracy. The Amersham experiment gained much publicity, but was still regarded in medicine as more of a novelty than as a development of any practical use.
Another British team, which was working under Dr Barbara Sommerville at Cambridge University’s renowned veterinary school, ran out of its £42,000 grant money with its work incomplete and has just been denied a further three years’ funding.
There is also a rich vein of anecdotal evidence of untrained dogs discovering cancers. Gill Lacey, 46, is a Buckinghamshire mother and the editor of a charity magazine. She appears in a documentary film about Pine Street’s work (Can Dogs Smell Cancer? to be shown on BBC4 tonight) and believes her life was saved when she was 19 by Trudii, her parents’ dalmatian.
“I was working in London at the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear hospital,” she said last week, “and went one weekend to my parents’ home in Winchester.
“Trudii was drawn towards one mole on my leg and would sniff and nibble at it. There was something odd about her behaviour that made me think that whatever it was, it was unpleasant to her. She was suspicious of it.”
It took several months of this behaviour by Trudii to get Lacey to go to hospital. “The truth is I was scared. Everything I’d read indicated there was nothing suspicious about the mole. It was tiny, it wasn’t growing or itching or changing.
“So I had no reason, other than the fact that the dog was sniffing at it, to go to the GP. But I’d been reading Richard Adams’s novel The Plague Dogs, in which lab dogs escape and pass the cancer lab and they know that it’s bad because it smells bad.”
As it turned out Trudii had detected, apparently by smell, what was a malignant melanoma in its earliest stage. Lacey had to have a large portion of skin removed from her leg, but has had no recurrence.
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
If you like this, you'll love Good Animal News:
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: