Man's Best Friend Joins The Fight Against Cancer

Dogs can detect whether someone has cancer by sniffing the person's breath, a new study shows.

Dogs trained to sniff out cancer With only a few weeks of basic "puppy training", the ordinary household dogs are able to detect both early and late-stage lung and breast cancers by merely sniffing the breath samples of patients.

The study was conducted by the Pine Street Foundation, a cancer research organization in San Anselmo, California, and published in the March issue of the journal Integrative Cancer Therapies.

According to Michael McCulloch, who led the research, their study provides “compelling evidence that cancers hidden beneath the skin can be detected simply by (dogs) examining a person's breath.”

Lung- and breast-cancer patients are known to exhale patterns of biochemical markers in their breath.

"Cancer cells emit different metabolic waste products than normal cells," said Nicholas Broffman, the executive director of the Pine Street Foundation. "The differences between these metabolic products are so great that they can be detected by a dog's keen sense of smell, even in the early stages of disease."

Dogs, known as the man’s best friend, are expected to become an important tool in early screening and detecting cancers, which can greatly improve a patient's survival chances.