Just give me one thing I can play for.
Disco boys on bicycles.
So what if too many times we have been here, both
Poetic Retrospective
The Weather votes for Kelly Clarkson.Canis familiaris is well known to posses a sense of smell with staggering sensitivity, able to detect chemicals at levels as low as parts per trillion. This ability has helped the dog get jobs sniffing bags for bombs and drugs, but has only recently shown useful the field of medicine. Dogs have been previously successful in identifying bladder cancers by smelling the urine of a patient, but a new finding suggests that they can identify some cancers just by smelling human breath.
Three Labradors and two Portuguese water dogs were trained for 3 weeks to distinguish between patients with known breast and lung tumors, and healthy individuals. Subjects breathed into special collection tubes, and those tubes were presented to the dogs. If the dog sniffed a cancer sample, she was taught to sit or lie down, while standing still for a normal sample. When I used to play fetch with my dog, she would only retrieve the ball about 50% of the time, preferring to wander off in another direction to look for grass to roll in or butts to sniff. These dogs however, correctly identified lung cancers with a 97% accuracy and very few false positives. If true, this is amazing.
The science behind this feat is based on a 20 year old finding that cancers release small amounts of specific chemical smells. These smells presented an opportunity for cancer detection, one which has just been realized in the dog's keen nose. If the results stand up to further investigation, trained dogs would be the most accurate method of cancer detection to date, especially since the dogs were able to correctly recognize early stage cancers.
The news comes from the Pine Street Foundation, a Marin County California institute that specializes in research into the combination of western medicine and homeopathic tradition (such as chemotherapy mixed with acupuncture ). This somewhat nontraditional background has made many scientists skeptical about the new findings, but lead investigator Michael McCulloch insists that the team's methods were scientifically rigorous and their dogs well bred.
A quick look at the Frequently Asked Questions of the Pine Street Foundation website reinforces that this is not your standard medical lab. "Can I have your dogs screen me to see if I have cancer?" and "How can I train my dog to detect cancer?" are two fairly standard entries. McCulloch admits that the findings will have to be supported, but the initial results are still astounding. The group also plans to try and determine the exact chemicals that the dogs are responding to, in hopes of developing other detection methods.
Early detection is key to the successful treatment of many of the most common cancers. For this reason, accurate detection methods have been an important focus in the fight against cancer, an area that has been inadequate thus far. The potential of this new technique, as well as others such as gene chips--a method that could determine if cancer related genes are being expressed in a drop of patient blood--offer much promise to the field. Now if I could only teach my dog to smell cancer...