Dogs have long been used to sniff out explosives, narcotics, and even counterfeit currency.Now, a new study shows that man’s best friend can also detect lung and breast cancer in breath samples."When we heard anecdotally that there was a device out there that might be able to detect cancer at its earliest stages, before it even shows up on an MRI [magnetic resonance imaging], it was something we wanted to pursue,” said Nicholas Broffman, executive director of the Pine Street Foundation, a nonprofit group in California that conducted the study. The group helps cancer patients who are facing tough treatment decisions.That device, of course, is a dog, and researchers believe it picks up on chemical differences that linger in the breath of a person with cancer.While canines won’t ever replace standard medical testing, experts think they may become an important early screening tool in the future.In this study, three Labrador retrievers and two Portuguese water dogs were trained in three weeks to either sit or lay down in front of breath samples from lung and breast cancer patients, while ignoring those of healthy individuals."These were not super dogs,” said Broffman. “They were just ordinary household pets."The trial comprised of breath samples from 55 patients with lung cancer, 31 with breast cancer, and 83 healthy people. The samples were captured in special tubes.All cancer patients had recently been diagnosed through conventional methods, such as mammograms or CT scans, but had not yet begun chemotherapy. And the trial samples were different from the ones used to train the dogs.The results show the dogs were 88 percent to 97 percent accurate in identifying both early- and late-stage breast and lung cancers.The study will appear in the March issue of Integrative Cancer Therapies.
