With 99% accuracy, researchers claim the canines can detect lung cancer in people’s breath.
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.