It's easy to tell which guys are assholes, but it takes a canine to tell which assholes have cancer.
With a sense of smell far superior to humans, dogs can sniff out plenty of things: they can find drugs or bombs or buried earthquake victims. And now, Japanese researchers say dogs can detect colorectal cancer.
The goal of the study was to find out whether odor can become an effective tool in colorectal cancer screening, and it was disgusting but important work. Samples of stool and exhaled breath from 40 patients with colorectal cancer along with 320 healthy people. In 33 of 36 breath tests and in 37 of 38 stool tests, the dog, a specially trained 8-year-old female Labrador retriever was successful, in distinguishing cancer. In contrast, standard fecal occult blood screening picks up colon cancer in only one out of 10 cases.
The dog was also able to identify cancers even when smokers and people with other stomach problems were included in the test. Scent ability and concentration vary between different dogs and also with the same dog on different days, and each dog can only conduct tests for a maximum of 10 years. For those reasons, researchers are trying to identify the cancer-specific organic compounds detected by dogs in order to develop an early cancer detection sensor that can be substituted for a dog's sense of smell.
With a sense of smell far superior to humans, dogs can sniff out plenty of things: they can find drugs or bombs or buried earthquake victims. And now, Japanese researchers say dogs can detect colorectal cancer.
The goal of the study was to find out whether odor can become an effective tool in colorectal cancer screening, and it was disgusting but important work. Samples of stool and exhaled breath from 40 patients with colorectal cancer along with 320 healthy people. In 33 of 36 breath tests and in 37 of 38 stool tests, the dog, a specially trained 8-year-old female Labrador retriever was successful, in distinguishing cancer. In contrast, standard fecal occult blood screening picks up colon cancer in only one out of 10 cases.
The dog was also able to identify cancers even when smokers and people with other stomach problems were included in the test. Scent ability and concentration vary between different dogs and also with the same dog on different days, and each dog can only conduct tests for a maximum of 10 years. For those reasons, researchers are trying to identify the cancer-specific organic compounds detected by dogs in order to develop an early cancer detection sensor that can be substituted for a dog's sense of smell.
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