Colleen
01-22-2006, 07:01 PM
With 99% accuracy, researchers claim the canines can detect lung cancer in people's breath.
Kobi, a Labrador, is one of five dogs a California clinic has trained to detect cancer by sniffing.
In the small world of people who train dogs to sniff cancer, a little-known Northern California clinic has made a big claim: that it has trained five dogs -- three Labradors and two Portuguese water dogs -- to detect lung cancer in the breath of cancer sufferers with 99 percent accuracy.
The study, published last year in the journal Integrative Cancer Therapies, was based on well-established concepts. It has been known since the 1980s that tumors exude tiny amounts of alkanes and benzene derivatives not found in healthy tissue. Other researchers have shown that dogs, whose noses can pick up odors in the low parts-per-billion range, can be trained to detect skin cancers or react differently to dried urine from healthy people and those with bladder cancer, but never with such remarkable consistency.
The near-perfection in the clinic's study, as Dr. Donald Berry, the chairman of biostatistics at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, put it, "is off the charts: there are no laboratory tests as good as this, not Pap tests, not diabetes tests, nothing."
As a result, he and other cancer experts say they are skeptical, but intrigued.
Michael McCulloch, research director for the Pine Street Foundation in Marin County, Calif., and the lead researcher on the study, acknowledged that the results seemed too good to be true. (For breast cancer, with a smaller number of samples, the dogs were right about 88 percent of the time with almost no false positives, which compares favorably to mammograms.)
"Yes, we were astounded, as well," McCulloch said. "And that's why it needs to be replicated with other dogs, plus chemical analysis of what's in the breath."
He is applying for National Science Foundation grants to try just that, he said.
See the article at Detnews.com (http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060122/LIFESTYLE03/601220317/1040/LIFESTYLE)
Kobi, a Labrador, is one of five dogs a California clinic has trained to detect cancer by sniffing.
In the small world of people who train dogs to sniff cancer, a little-known Northern California clinic has made a big claim: that it has trained five dogs -- three Labradors and two Portuguese water dogs -- to detect lung cancer in the breath of cancer sufferers with 99 percent accuracy.
The study, published last year in the journal Integrative Cancer Therapies, was based on well-established concepts. It has been known since the 1980s that tumors exude tiny amounts of alkanes and benzene derivatives not found in healthy tissue. Other researchers have shown that dogs, whose noses can pick up odors in the low parts-per-billion range, can be trained to detect skin cancers or react differently to dried urine from healthy people and those with bladder cancer, but never with such remarkable consistency.
The near-perfection in the clinic's study, as Dr. Donald Berry, the chairman of biostatistics at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, put it, "is off the charts: there are no laboratory tests as good as this, not Pap tests, not diabetes tests, nothing."
As a result, he and other cancer experts say they are skeptical, but intrigued.
Michael McCulloch, research director for the Pine Street Foundation in Marin County, Calif., and the lead researcher on the study, acknowledged that the results seemed too good to be true. (For breast cancer, with a smaller number of samples, the dogs were right about 88 percent of the time with almost no false positives, which compares favorably to mammograms.)
"Yes, we were astounded, as well," McCulloch said. "And that's why it needs to be replicated with other dogs, plus chemical analysis of what's in the breath."
He is applying for National Science Foundation grants to try just that, he said.
See the article at Detnews.com (http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060122/LIFESTYLE03/601220317/1040/LIFESTYLE)