Maybe they’ll take a bite out of cancer...
We all know that dogs can track the lost and detect drugs at airports and border crossings. Now they have been trained to detect prostate cancer by identifying a specific scent in male urine (which, I’m told, is NOT in the male at the time of diagnosis). This has nothing to do with the dogs in your life that have been unrepentant crotch sniffers.
There are a number of articles and blogs explaining the research and telling you everything except just what exactly it is the dogs are detecting. Here are two links that pretty much sum up the French study.
Sniffing Out Cancer or Study Finds Dogs Can Detect Prostate Cancer will give you more details or maybe just wagging tails.
I’ll bet you really want to know if you’ll encounter a dog the next time you visit your oncologist. Probably not, but stranger things have happened. The dogs in the study were 95% accurate – much better than the reported 85% accuracy of the tried and true PSA. Maybe some combination of blood samples and urine sniffing will turn out to be 99% accurate!
The value of this study is probably in the fact that there is something that can be detected in urine and clever scientists will probably find another, less canine, way to detect it. Sorry Rover, sit, stay, good boy.
For most of us who already have prostate cancer this potential breakthrough won’t do much, but it just might help our sons and grandsons. We’ll see.
axman
We all know that dogs can track the lost and detect drugs at airports and border crossings. Now they have been trained to detect prostate cancer by identifying a specific scent in male urine (which, I’m told, is NOT in the male at the time of diagnosis). This has nothing to do with the dogs in your life that have been unrepentant crotch sniffers.
There are a number of articles and blogs explaining the research and telling you everything except just what exactly it is the dogs are detecting. Here are two links that pretty much sum up the French study.
Sniffing Out Cancer or Study Finds Dogs Can Detect Prostate Cancer will give you more details or maybe just wagging tails.
I’ll bet you really want to know if you’ll encounter a dog the next time you visit your oncologist. Probably not, but stranger things have happened. The dogs in the study were 95% accurate – much better than the reported 85% accuracy of the tried and true PSA. Maybe some combination of blood samples and urine sniffing will turn out to be 99% accurate!
The value of this study is probably in the fact that there is something that can be detected in urine and clever scientists will probably find another, less canine, way to detect it. Sorry Rover, sit, stay, good boy.
For most of us who already have prostate cancer this potential breakthrough won’t do much, but it just might help our sons and grandsons. We’ll see.
axman
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