Dogs have the potential to serve as alternate means for screening cancer. New research supports the claim that canines can sniff out the disease, with test subjects demonstrating 98-percent accuracy in identifying prostate cancer.

In a study conducted by the Humanitas Clinical and Research Center, researchers trained a pair of three-year-old female German Shepherds to identify volatile organic compounds specific to prostate cancer in urine samples obtained from a control group of 540 healthy individuals and 362 patients diagnosed with the disease.

According to the results, dog 1 exhibited 100 percent sensitivity and 98.7 percent specificity while dog 2 showed 98.6 percent sensitivity and 97.6 percent specificity. When just samples from men older than 45 from the control group were used, dog 1 had 100 percent sensitivity and 98 percent specificity while dog 2 recorded 98.6 percent sensitivity and 96.4 specificity.

Whereas further testing will have to be carried out to fully determine the role dogs can play in cancer screening, the results of the study show that the concept has a lot of promise. Prostate cancer is currently diagnosed through blood tests, biopsies and physical examinations.

Medical Detection Dogs, a charity based in Buckingham, has been training dogs to sniff out diseases. It has carried out similar research which showed dogs can achieve 93-percent accuracy. The results of the study showing that dog screening sensitivities could be even higher were therefore welcomed by co-founder Claire Guest as "spectacular."

"They offer us further proof that dogs have the ability to detect human cancer," Guest added, noting the results were particularly exciting because they focused on prostate cancer, for which current diagnostic tests are considered inadequate.

Guest believes that too many resources have gone into traditional testing methods, as their reliability has not improved much. Detection dogs, on the other hand, have showed consistent accuracy in tests.

"If our detection dogs were a machine," she said, "there would be a huge demand for them."

According to the American Cancer Society, prostate cancer is the most common of cancers in American men, after skin cancer. It is estimated that there will be around 220,800 new prostate cancer cases diagnosed and 27,540 deaths associated with the disease in 2015 in the United States. While prostate cancer mostly occurs in older men, one in seven will be diagnosed with the disease during their lifetime. 

Photo: Georgie Pauwels | Flickr