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!!!

Mitochondrial linkage of Cancer

It has long been considered that the glycolysis is the major metabolic process that drives aberrant cancer cell proliferation, suggesting that the impaired mitochondrial function may be the underlying cause of cancer. These findings have eventually eradicated the major misconception that cancer is a purely cell-intrinsic disorder that stems from epigenetic or genetic alterations. Although the mitochondrial defect for cancer invasiveness is long known, its relation to treatment resistance remained unclear.

Recently, from the studies of aggressive breast cancer cells, scientists have found that the movement of mitochondria inside the cell is being controlled by the pathway- called Arf6-AMP1-PRKD2. It is known that the mitochondria generally move inside the cells under various circumstances but in cancer cells, it congregates in the leading rim of the cell. It is due to the pathway- Arf6-AMP1-PRKD2, which helps to recycle the protein, named integrin in the cancerous cells which then forms the adhesion complex in the cell’s membrane triggering the movement of mitochondria to the edge of the cell.

To understand the motion of the mitochondria in the cells, the researchers carried out the experiments in the breast cancer cells where they blocked the pathway. They observed that instead of the edge of the cell, the mitochondria congregate in the middle of the cell and thus, reduced invasiveness. This happens because the mitochondria started to produce and release excessive amounts of unstable oxygen-rich molecules known as reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the middle of the cell. The ROS molecules promote cancer invasiveness up to certain levels but when they become in excess, they kill cancer cells.

Radiotherapy uses ionizing radiation to shrink or eradicate tumors by increasing the production of ROS molecule inside the cancer cells. However, some cancers have become resistant to radiotherapy and other treatments that employ the ROS molecules as they have developed the tolerance to the molecules. But these findings of the molecular link between cell movements and mitochondrial dynamics may lead to novel strategies to improve ROS-mediated cancer therapies.