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Joi, 17 August 2023 16:55

Dogs are particularly good at detecting disease with their keen sense of smell

It’s been estimated that dogs smell up to 10,000 times better than us. That’s in part because they have about 220 million scent receptors, whereas humans have a mere 5 million. But dogs also inhale in short breaths up to 300 times a minute, meaning that their olfactory cells are constantly picking up new scents. It’s these factors that make them effective – and adorable – real-time disease detectors.

When we’re sick, we produce compounds that waft around us. In infectious or disease states, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are emitted in breath, blood, sweat and urine, creating a volatilome or ‘aura’ of molecules around the human body. These VOCs often result in changes in body odor, which, studies have found, are detectable by dogs. But what conditions are dogs able to detect?

Here are eight diseases that our furry friends are particularly good at sniffing out.

Cancer

Research has shown that trained dogs can detect different types of cancer, including melanoma, colorectal (bowel), lung, ovarian, prostate and breast cancers. A 2021 study found that a trained dog could sniff out breast cancer from the urine samples of 200 people with 100% accuracy. Of these people, 40 had breast cancer, 182 had other cancers, and 18 were found not to have cancer.

But dogs don’t necessarily have to be trained to detect cancer. In a 2013 case study, an Alsatian, who happened to be a rescue dog, persistently licked at an asymptomatic lesion behind her 75-year-old owner’s ear. After seeing his doctor, the man was diagnosed with malignant melanoma.

Diabetic alert dogs (DADs) are service dogs that are specially trained to alert their owners to high and low blood sugar levels; both potentially life-threatening conditions. A 2016 study out of the UK suggested that a dropping blood sugar produces a VOC called isoprene, which is not detectable by humans but that dogs can smell. A study published in 2019 looking at the reliability of dogs at detecting blood sugars found that, while there was variability between individual dogs, on average 81% of alerts occurred when sugar levels were ‘out of range,’ that is, too high or too low.

* sursa : https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/diseases-that-dogs-are-good-at-detecting-volatile-organic-compounds/?utm_source=New+Atlas+Subscribers&utm_campaign=a955560ddd-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_08_16_08_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-a955560ddd-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D