Dog's olfactory acuity is no need to doubt. The advantage is now used for health purposes, because the dog was also able to detect through urine samples of prostate cancer patients.
Several previous studies have also concluded that dogs can detect a number of diseases, including diabetes. But in cancer, these findings are very important because many cases of cancer detected too late, so hard to treat.
Early detection for prostate cancer is still difficult to do. Existing method that is Prostate Specific Antigent (PSA) is considered less accurate, because they can not distinguish between benign tumors with a dangerous cancer.
Another method being developed is through a urine sample. But the difficulty is some molecule other than cancer also creates a special smell, and there is no tool that can distinguish the smell of cancer cells.
Quoted from Health Day, Wednesday (02/06/2010), the problem is now to find a bright spot when researchers from France succeeded in doing experiments with dogs. Intelligent animals known it was able to distinguish the odor in question.
"Dogs are able to recognize the odor molecules produced by cancer cells. It's just that we do not yet know what molecules and the dog can not tell," says Jean Nicolas Cutaneous, researchers at the Hospital Tenon, France.
In these trials the researchers trained Belgian Malinois dog, the kind that is also used to track bombs and drugs. These dogs are taught to sniff urine samples of patients with prostate cancer, then
compare it with some healthy human urine samples.
At the end of training, researchers gave urine samples randomly for recognized by these dogs. The result is encouraging, the dog can guess correctly the presence of cancer cells in 63 of 66 samples provided.
A urology specialist, Dr. Anthony Y. Smith is optimistic with these findings. If the results are valid, according to him in the future a biopsy (tissue sample) are no longer required to detect prostate cancer.
The next step is to make sure what the actual molecular kissed by a dog on the urine samples of prostate cancer patients. Researchers are also developing tools such as 'electric nose' with capabilities similar to a dog.
But to hire a dog in the hospital, seems less attractive because the cost is considerable. According Cutaneous, the cost required to train a dog is equivalent to two people scientist honorarium.
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