Man’s best friend just got a little bit better – dogs are able to sniff out early stages of bowel cancer, medical researchers have revealed.
Dogs’ noses have long been recognised for being able to distinguish complex scents, such as compounds specific to drugs or explosives.
But experts have found that certain chemical combinations in some cancers can accurately be detected by dogs in human breath and stool samples. ‘The accuracy of canine scent detection was high – even for early cancer,’ said lead researcher Prof Hideto Sonoda, of Kyushu University.
‘This shows a specific cancer scent does indeed exist and that cancer- specific chemical compounds may be circulating throughout the body.
‘These odour materials may become effective tools in cancer screening.’ In the study, a nine-year-old female labrador named Marine sniffed samples from 300 people, detecting the cancer in known sufferers and ignoring healthy volunteers’ stool samples with 98 per cent accuracy.
The dog also correctly identified cancers from breath tests alone – with 92 per cent accuracy.
The current NHS screening programme uses a faecal occult blood test, which detects minute amounts of blood in stools – a sign of bowel cancer. But the team behind the latest study say this only picks up one in ten cases of early stage bowel cancer.
‘In the future, studies designed to identify cancer-specific volatile organic compounds will be important for the development of new methods for early detection,’ the Japanese research consortium wrote in the British Society of Gastroenterology journal, Gut.