DOGS CAN TRULY BE OUR BEST FRIENDS
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009During the course of determining whether I should invest in a documentary film about dogs, I gained some quite interesting insights into the potentially new role dogs can play in our health care system. Because dogs have a sense of smell that is 40 times as acute and discriminating as that residing in humans, some researchers have explored whether dogs can detect diseases as accurately and reliability as much more expensive technologies, with no need for invasive and time-consuming diagnostic processes.
Two organizations, the Pine Street Foundation in California and the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University, have each done reported studies which have concluded that dogs can reliably detect various kinds of cancers, such as prostate, breast and skin cancers, because tumor cells give off different odors from regular cells. It will be quite interesting to determine whether their reliable detection is such that they can detect the presence of these diseases even earlier than more high-tech alternatives like 64-slice CT scans or MRI’s or nuclear magnetic resonance systems. Dogs apparently have demonstrated as well that they can detect the imminence of an epileptic seizure minutes before the individual subject to the seizure has any symptoms.







