JACKSON, Miss.- Man’s best friend could be the future of cancer detection. New research out of Italy found that dogs can actually detect prostate cancer with a 98% accuracy rate; that has a higher accuracy rate than some of the most advanced lab procedures.
According to the CDC, Mississippi has one of the highest rates of detection and deaths from prostate cancer found in people that live here than anywhere else in the country.
The study presented May 18 at the annual meeting of the American Urological Association in Orlando showed that highly trained dogs could detect prostate cancer in urine with 98% accuracy.
Dogs are a low cost and non invasive way to diagnose cancer. Using dogs could reduce the number of unnecessary biopsies and ultimately save your life and lots of money.
The doctors of the study said this was encouraging news, but would not eliminate doctors and would still need to be combined with other common diagnostic tools such as, PSA, biopsy, MRI’s and others.
Lead author Dr. Gianluigi Taverna, chief of the prostatic diseases unit at the Humanitas Research Hospital in Milan, Italy told Fox News, his team hopes to pinpoint exactly what the dogs are picking up on. “We want to expand on our current study by converting the chemicals detected by the dogs into gas chromatography-mass spectrometry so the process can be duplicated by machine. “
People have nearly five million olfactory cells (receptors that detect different odors) in their noses and dogs have about 200 million. That’s why law enforcement and the military have used dogs to help locate bombs, drugs and missing people for many years and now they can be used to help detect cancer.
