Dogs detect lung cancer better than humans

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The accuracy of such diagnostics is 97%, which is higher than the effectiveness of laboratory tests. We are talking about Beagle dogs, which are specially trained to sniff out malignant neoplasms.

Back in 1998, scientists first suggested that dogs are able to detect tumors by smell. In the past few years, a number of large-scale studies have been devoted to developing the abilities of these dogs to diagnose skin, breast, bladder, and lung tumors.

One resident of Alabama named Cindy Roberts trained an entire group of Beagle dogs to sniff out lung tumors. Cindy herself has been training dogs professionally since 1982, but recently she switched to diagnosing tumor diseases after her mother died just 6 days after being diagnosed with lung cancer.

Cindy promised her dying mother to help other people detect this disease in time. If lung cancer is detected at the first or second stage, the probability of defeating this disease is close to 80%. And now, a scientific study has confirmed the high accuracy of canine diagnostics, which exceeds the level of laboratory equipment.

Currently, computed tomography, X-ray and positron emission tomography are used to diagnose tumors before a biopsy and analysis under a microscope to establish a final diagnosis. But all these tests are not 100% reliable, but they hit the patients' pockets.

Cindy Roberts' beagles sniff urine, plasma or tissue samples of different people, with incredible accuracy (up to 97%) determining the presence of lung tumor biomarkers. However, this is not surprising, considering that the level of smell of dogs is 10,000 times higher than the human nose.