This was highlighted in a new study that was presented at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology annual meeting, which held in Orlando from April 6 to 9. The study showed that dogs could use their highly evolved sense of smell to pick out blood samples from people with cancer with almost 97 percent accuracy.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported that Junqueira and her colleagues used a form of clicker training to teach four beagles to distinguish between normal blood serum and samples from patients with malignant lung cancer. Although one beagle was unmotivated to perform, the other three dogs correctly identified lung cancer samples 96.7 per cent of the time and normal samples 97.5 per cent of the time, according to the study.
The beagle is a breed of small hound (dog) that is similar in appearance to the much larger foxhound. The beagle is a scent hound, developed primarily for hunting hare.
The researchers plan to use canine scent detection to develop a non-invasive way of screening for cancer. T hey also hope to determine the biologic compounds the dogs detect and then design cancerscreening tests based on those compounds.
Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. According to World Health Organisation (WHO), there were 17 million new cases of cancer worldwide in 2018.
The four most common cancers occurring worldwide are lung, female breast, bowel and prostate cancers. These four account for more than four in ten of all cancers diagnosed worldwide. Worldwide, there will be 27.5 million new cases of cancer each year by 2040, the WHO has projected.
