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Dogs Smell Bladder Cancer
Dusty M. Bastian / Assistant Editor
dusty_bastian@pipeline.owens.edu
In research published in the British Medical Journal, scientists have
shown that dogs can detect bladder cancer by “smelling” chemicals
in urine characteristic of cancerous cells.
“Dogs can be trained to detect some odor characteristics for bladder
cancer,” according to Dr. Carolyn Willis, of Amersham Hospital in
Buckingham, England. Cancer cells are thought to produce organic compounds
with distinctive odors that dogs can detect even in small quantities.
Willis and her colleagues trained six dogs, their ages and breeds varying,
to identify samples from 36 bladder cancer patients among 108 healthy
volunteers; 63 of these samples were used exclusively to test the dogs.
Each dog participated in nine tests in which involved distinguishing the
urine of a cancer patient from six other “healthy” samples.
The dogs had an average success rate of 41 percent, which Willis said
is significant because it would have been 14 percent by chance alone.
The dogs consistently identified a “health” urine sample as
cancerous, and the doctors deemed the test hopeless. However, after further
testing of the “healthy patient,” it was discovered that the
volunteer, in fact, tested positive for bladder cancer. This case would
have missed, if not for the canine.
Dr. Carolyn Willis believes that dogs could play an important role in
allowing scientists to identify the compounds emitted by cancerous cells
which will also help in developing better tests.
Bladder cancer is the ninth most common cancer worldwide with 330,000
new cases each year and more that 130,000 deaths, according to the International
Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France. Smoking is a leading risk
factor for bladder cancer.