Dogs’ Enhanced Smelling Ability Plays An Important Role In Detecting Cancer

The detective abilities of dogs go way beyond the fictional abilities of dog cartoon characters like Mumbly, Scobby Do, and Snuffles. The cancer detection abilities of dogs is real, highly accurate, and useful.

Dogs’ enhanced smell detection ability is powered by their dual smelling system and 300 million scent sensors. In comparison, humans only have 5 million sensors.

Dogs’ also have a second organ called the Jacobson’s organ that humans don’t have. The highly enhanced dual system allows dogs to pick up scents that humans are not capable of smelling.

This dual system allows dogs’ to accurately detect the presence of cancer, even in smalls amounts. The black dog in the video in named Lucy and is a mix between a Labrador retriever and an Irish water spaniel.

Lucy has been used in a previous study^[1] to detect prostate, kidney, and bladder cancer, and has been able to detect cancer 95% of the time, which is better than some laboratory tests used to detect cancer.

Lucy is now part of a very large clinical trial using 8 dogs to detect cancer in 3000 urine samples of patients to determine who has cancer and who doesn’t.

The aim to to validate the use of dogs in detecting cancer alongside diagnostic cancer tests.