I think you have Cancer: Look what your Dog knows

The great ability of animals to sense danger such as the natural disaster like earthquakes, tsunamis etc., are already well known. But most interestingly it was found that the dogs can sense and detect cancer and other diseases. In recent years, this observation has become an area of interest and attracted widespread coverage. Many researches have been done to reason this outstanding ability of the dogs.

The dazzling smelling ability of Dogs is no secret. They can smell even the slightest odor such as a drop of blood in a swimming pool. This remarkable sense of smell is already in use for dogs to sniff narcotics and explosives in the military. But the studies have suggested that this olfactory ability of dogs is also useful to sniff out cancer and other diseases in humans and has been named as Canine cancer detection.

As humans can smell cancer in the later stages of cancer, it makes sense that dogs are able to detect cancer way before at zero stage and are well qualified for this accomplishment. Dogs have 300 million smell receptors compared to humans with only 6 million of them. This boosts their smelling ability to 100,000 times. Also, the greater part of a dog’s brain is devoted to smell or the olfactory cortex, which is dominated by visual cortex in human, making the dogs to analyze smells 40 times better than us.

But the question arises that what is there in cancer that dog smells?

This is supported by the fact that cancerous cells release very low concentrations of the alkanes and aromatic compounds that is different from the metabolic products generated by healthy cells. This significant change can be smelled by the dogs in urine, sweat, feces, and breath. This has been confirmed in case of skin cancers where dogs detect cancer by just simply sniffing the skin lesions.

This potential advantage of dog has significant benefits for human in the medical field. Using a dog to detect cancer even at the earliest stage or at the stage enough to be treatable, can greatly help to cure a patient.  Canine care detection is a low-risk and non-invasive method and offers various other advantages. Some researchers believe the trained dogs will become integrated directly into patient care, while other researchers recommend using this skill for developing machines that can reliably detect odor signatures from cancer, such as electronic noses.

In almost all the cases where the owners get themselves diagnosed as per the alert from their dogs, it is detected early enough to be treatable with a positive outcome.

So, if your dogs started acting weirdly around you or your family, listen to them and visit a Doctor!!!