Dogs Can Smell Cancer!

I found this article and thought it was fascinating so am sharing with all of you.



Discovery of the Week
Dogs Can Smell Cancer


The future of Lab tests


Watch out. Your medical care may soon go to the dogs. That's because a new scientific study confirms what some anecdotal reports have suggested: dogs can smell cancer.

Medical researchers trained five ordinary dogs (three Labrador retrievers and two Portuguese water dogs) to sniff breath samples from both healthy folks and cancer patients. Out of 55 samples from patients with early-stage lung cancer, 31 from patients with early-stage breast cancer, and 83 healthy controls, the dogs identified the cancer patients between 88 and 97 percent of the time.

"We've seen anecdotal evidence before suggesting that dogs can smell the presence of certain types of cancer," says lead researcher Michael McCulloch, "but until now, nobody had conducted a thorough study." Doctors know that cancer cells release different metabolic waste products than normal cells. Apparently, dogs can smell these biochemical markers. Says McCulloch, "The dog's brain and nose hardware is currently the most sophisticated odor detection device on the planet."

In fact, scientists estimate that dogs can identify smells as much as 10,000 times better than you can. Some of the difference lies in their supersensitive snouts. While you have enough scent-detecting cells to cover a postage stamp, dogs have enough to cover a sheet of paper. You've got about 5 million sniffer cells. A bloodhound has 300 million.

But it's not all in the nose. Fido's brain may be only one-tenth the size of yours, but the part of his that processes smells weighs four times more, on average, than that part of yours. In other words, his brain is 40 times more dedicated to analyzing smells than yours is. Where you smell nothing, he smells the dead cells that fell to the ground hours ago and picks up your trail. And, based on tiny changes in the intensity of their odor, his brain tells him you went thataway! It might even tell him you need to see a doctor.



"You think dogs will not be in heaven?
I tell you, they will be there long before any of us."

--Robert

My husband was found to have Esophgeal Cancer on March 20, 2006. We have three dogs and one of them Buster, always was pushing his nose on my husbands chest, where the cancer was found, and while he was sleeping, Buster would come up and wake him up....while he was smelling his breath. My husband has gone through 13 weeks of chemo and 5 weeks of radiation. On the 13th of October he had surgery. All of this was done at M.D. Anderson in Houston, Tx. He's gone though all of this with out much sickness. Buster no longer smells any place on him. The Dr.s say they got it all and Buster agrees.......