Dogs can sniff out lung cancer

Spanish scientists have discovered that dogs are very effective at sniffing out and detecting lung cancer.

Blat dog has the ability to sniff out and detect lung cancer. Photo: Barcelona Clinical Hospital.

Blat, a Labrador-Pitbull mix, has the ability to detect the odor of substances characteristic of lung cancer cells, based on a person's breath with very high accuracy. This is the discovery of Sputnik Mundo and colleagues at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, ​​Spain, according to Sputnik News. The research results were published in the European Journal of Cardiovascular Surgery, published by the University of Oxford, UK, in July 2017.

"Blat was trained for three to four months to sniff and identify the breath of lung cancer patients. Then it was given breath samples from cancer patients and healthy people. In more than 700 tests, Blat was able to identify people with cancer with 98% accuracy," said Laureano Molins, a member of the research team.

Every time a patient exhales, they release about 300 volatile organic compounds. While the team doesn’t yet know which ones are linked to lung cancer, Blat has the ability to detect them.

Dogs’ unique abilities promise to be a new tool for detecting lung cancer, one of the deadliest diseases. Currently, only about 3 in 10 people with lung cancer are candidates for surgery. In most cases, surgery is not possible. The reason is that patients are diagnosed too late, when the cancer has spread throughout the body.

Doctors now use a variety of methods to detect tumors, such as CT scans. In such tests, many tumors are found that are not malignant. Some are scars from pneumonia and some are the result of living in an urban environment.

"We do tests to detect malignant tumors using positron emission tomography (PET). But now dogs' ability to sniff can help us," said Molins.

According to VNE