More interspecies assist in addressing one of our most vexing problems: detecting cancer. According to Deborah Kotz's article in today's Boston Globe, "Dogs may help detect cancer of the colon:"
Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Japanese researchers say they’ve successfully trained an 8-year-old female black Labrador retriever to sniff out colon cancer on the breath of a patient.
Published Monday by the digestive health journal Gut, the study adds to previous research suggesting that dogs can be useful for cancer detection. Studies over the past few years have shown that dogs can detect melanoma, bladder, lung, ovarian, and breast cancer, also by sniffing the breath of cancer patients...
In the current study, the black Lab sniffed 33 breath samples from patients with colon cancer and 132 samples from healthy controls, about half of whom had benign colon polyps. The dog sniffed each sample, five to a group, and was trained to sit in front of the one that had cancer.
She correctly identified those who had cancer 91 percent of the time — correctly distinguishing between cancerous and benign polyps — and was correct in excluding healthy samples 99 percent of the time when compared with findings on a colonoscopy.
Before going any further, let me say this: "the digestive health journal Gut" - ??? So much for JAMA or NEJM. Let's call it what it is...
Anyway, with cancer in the family, all this stuff jumps out at me, especially when the prevailing disease in our family was not detected (some say detectable) until it was Stage IV.
Bring on the dogs...and meanwhile, I'm waiting to hear what my GI doc-friends have to say about this.
