By Helena Sung- Pet News Examiner
A Belgian Malinois dog spent a year in training with two researchers and emerged with the ability to sniff out prostate cancer in human urine samples. The dog’s accuracy rate? About 95%.
“In 66 tests, the dog was correct 63 times,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “There were three false positives and no false negatives. That is, the dog correctly identified all the specimens from prostate cancer patients, but misidentified three from healthy men.”
The ability of conventional tests to detect prostate cancer has been “particularly controversial,” states the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). “Some researchers think many patients are treated unnecessarily because existing tests of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) aren’t accurate enough and fail to distinguish between dangerous and harmless cancers,” the agency states.
If the dog’s ability to sniff out prostate cancer holds consistent under further testing, it “could lead to the development of more accurate tests that don’t require unnecessary biopsies,” reports DHHS, including a possible “electronic nose” to smell for cancer molecules.
“The dogs are certainly recognizing the odor of a molecule that is produced by cancer cells,” said the study’s lead researcher, Jean-Nicolas Cornu of Hospital Tenon in Paris. “We do not know what this molecule is, and the dog cannot tell us.”