Surprisingly, the accuracy of "Dog Doctor" in cancer detection is as high as 97%

The working dogs we hear more about in our lives are usually military dogs and police dogs, but you may not know that there is another lesser-known type of working dog - "dog doctors", who are silently contributing to human cancer screening.

Wait, a dog doctor? Is that a dog doctor?

No, no, no, the “dog doctor” I’m going to talk about next can really detect cancer. To be more precise, it can smell it .

In 1989, the first paper on dogs being able to smell cancer was published in The Lancet Medical Journal. It was about a woman who had a mole on her right leg, but she didn't take it seriously. But after the mole started to appear, her dog began to behave strangely.

For example, the dog often sniffed and licked the mole, and once tried to bite it off. So the owner thought the dog was sick and took it for a checkup. It turned out that the dog was not sick, but he was sick.

It turned out that the mole on her leg was a malignant melanoma, but it was discovered early and removed before it spread. After the removal, her dog never exhibited such behavior again.

Coincidentally, a 75-year-old white man went to the hospital for a checkup because his dog kept licking the area behind his right ear. It was found that there was a nodular lesion in the asymptomatic area behind his right ear, which was also confirmed to be a malignant melanoma.

As time goes by, more and more similar things are reported. On the one hand, people are amazed that dogs have such abilities. On the other hand, there are more and more voices of doubt: Can dogs really use their sense of smell to smell whether a person has cancer?

Here I have to mention a Labrador named Daisy . Daisy is usually very gentle and kind, but one day she suddenly became reluctant to get close to her owner and even showed some aggressive behavior.

And these aggressive behaviors were all directed at the owner's chest. Until one day, Daisy threw her owner to the ground with her paws, and then the owner felt a lump in the upper outer quadrant of the breast.

It was because of Daisy's series of abnormal behaviors that the owner discovered that she had breast cancer at an early stage. She underwent surgery to remove some lymph nodes. Due to the early discovery and timely treatment, the cancer has been completely controlled. After the owner's breast cancer was cured, Daisy returned to her previous well-behaved state.

Daisy's owner happens to be Dr. Claire, an animal behavior psychologist. After her life was saved by her beloved dog, Claire began to focus on the dog's sense of smell for cancer and began to train Daisy at the same time.

Research has shown that dogs can indeed use their highly evolved sense of smell to sniff out cancer in a patient's blood sample with nearly 97 percent accuracy .

Because dogs' olfactory receptors are 10,000 times more sensitive than humans', they can detect many odors that we cannot. Dogs that have been trained can even detect substances at concentrations of a few parts per trillion.

Cancer cells are often accompanied by volatile organic compounds, which leave specific odors and traces in the body or body secretions.

Although scientists have been studying the detection of specific volatile organic compounds in cancer cells (based on gas chromatography) for decades, dogs currently perform significantly better than other similar technologies.

Daisy has been trained to be a cancer detection dog. In five years, she has sniffed 6,500 samples and detected 551 cases of cancer with an accuracy rate of 93%.

Daisy has been awarded the Blue Cross for her pioneering work in cancer detection and is helping to train a team of 12 dogs at the Medical Detection Dogs HQ. She is a senior advisor on the UK's first ever trial using dogs to detect breast cancer.

Dogs that have been specially trained can now detect colorectal cancer in stool samples, lung cancer in breath, ovarian cancer in blood samples, and prostate cancer in urine samples, all with high accuracy.

I never thought that having a dog can not only provide us with companionship, but also save lives at critical moments. However, these talents vary from dog to dog, and not every dog ​​can become a dog doctor. For example, some dogs are more suitable for other jobs, such as "decorating" the house.