One disease that has caused devastation over the decades is cancer. While a tremendous amount of research has gone into studying the disease, scientists are still looking for that elusive cure.
It is not only the cure that is an issue – another problem is diagnosing the issue at an early stage, when then chances of effective treatment are higher. Often the cancer is not picked up until it has moved into the more advanced stages.
However, over recent years, experts have realized that our dogs could play a big part in this process with studies showing that they can detect the presence of cancer.
When it comes to cancer detection, it appears that dogs have some keen senses. Dogs have small receptors, 10,000 times more accurate than humans, making them hypersensitive to odors we can’t perceive,
The critical thing that make dogs so adapt at detecting cancer in a person is their sense of smell. There are certain smalls associated with different forms of cancer, and these can be present in our urine, on our breath, and even on gross lesions caused by diseases.
However, human do not pick up these smells during the early stages of cancer, although they can detect them in the later stages. Dogs yet, have an incredible sense of small and this enables them to pick up on cancer smells incredibly early on, even at stage 0.
If your dog does small cancer, it may act different from normal. Some dogs will keep sniffing at you all the time and you may struggle to push them away. Others may lick at the lesions on your body – it’s their way of try to heal and get rid of the cancer for you. Other dogs may continuously try to get your attention through pawing or whining or even start moving their head by tilting it, they may even just sit and stare at you. You will find dogs will want to also comfort you, snuggle up to you and follow you around a bit more than usual.
A new study has shown that dogs use their highly evolved sense of smell to pick out blood samples from humans with cancer with almost a 97% accuracy. The results could lead to new cancer-screening approaches that are inexpensive and accurate without being invasive to the human body.
