Psychic Animals by Michelle Waitzman

Author:Michelle Waitzman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcturus

CANCER STINKS!

Early detection can greatly increase your chances of surviving cancer, but by the time symptoms appear and an official diagnosis is confirmed, the cancer has often progressed beyond the earliest stages. Any new tool that can detect cancers sooner would greatly reduce the number of lives lost to this widespread disease. So, how can dogs help?

It turns out that dogs can be trained to recognize the smell of some kinds of cancer, even before there are any symptoms that the patient can detect. It may seem strange to you that cancer has a recognizable smell, but it’s actually no surprise to oncologists (cancer specialists) who say that in the late stages of the disease, even humans notice a distinct smell on the breath of cancer patients. Dogs, however, have a sense of smell thousands of times more sensitive than ours, so they can smell it much sooner.

Cancer is such a common and deadly disease that researchers are willing to explore any avenue to save more lives. Studies on dogs’ abilities to sniff out cancer have had promising results. Studies involving samples of breath, urine and biopsies of affected areas have shown that dogs can definitely smell which samples are from patients with cancer and which are not. These studies involved dogs sniffing four or five samples and choosing the correct ones. Much like training dogs to identify the smell of narcotics or explosives, by rewarding the dogs’ successes their handlers were able to train them to indicate when they found a cancer sample.

While there is no doubt that dogs can identify the smell of a particular type of cancer when trained to do so, the reliability of their skills is not strong enough to screen for cancer this way. In the studies, there were too many false positive and false negative indications for researchers to feel confident that dogs are ready to save the day.

This research is not a waste, however, as scientists are taking what they’ve learned from the dogs and applying it to a different approach. Scientists at the Israel Institute of Technology are working on developing ‘sniffer’ machines that detect the same subtle components in the breath or urine of sick patients that dogs are able to smell. Some recent research was conducted with a machine using carbon nanotubes and gold particles to isolate chemicals called volatile organic compounds in samples of exhaled breath from over 1,400 participants. The machine was programmed to recognize the chemical signatures associated with 17 different diseases, including cancers, Crohn’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. The machine identified the diseases each participant had with 86 per cent accuracy. Scientists around the world are working on similar cancer-spotting breath analysers, including one group at Imperial College, London, and another team, looking specifically at lung cancer, at the University of Leicester.

The best part of this new technology is the price. These machines can be manufactured for around £25 each – much less than the cost of training a cancer-sniffing dog. So we may not

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.