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Dogs Trained To Sniff Out Ovarian Cancer
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Dogs have been trained to sniff out drugs, explosives, cadavers, mobile phones, firearms, and money but now AP reports that researchers have started training canines to sniff out the signature compound that indicates the presence of ovarian cancer. If the animals can isolate the chemical marker, scientists at the nearby Monell Chemical Senses Center will work to create an electronic sensor to identify the same odorant. "Because if the dogs can do it, then the question is, Can our analytical instrumentation do it? We think we can," says organic chemist George Preti. More than 20,000 Americans are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year. When it's caught early, women have a five-year survival rate of 90 percent. But because of its generic symptoms — weight gain, bloating or constipation — the disease is more often caught late."
Wanted: Annoying crotch sniffing dog. While any breed will do, one who's head is about waist height and who's nose is not too messy is preferred. Top dollar will be paid for obsessive-compulsive sniffers.
"When it's caught early, women have a five-year survival rate of 90 percent" - this is true for nearly all cancers even if there is no treatment. The fire-year survival rate depends MOSTLY on when you diagnose someone. And if you have a high false-positive in your diagnosis then you get a really big boost to the five-year survival rate. Screening programs boost the metric, but they don't necessarily boost actual survival, as the fire-year time starts from diagnosis.
This is a pretty good idea as dogs like to smell genitals anyway. They should do it for testicular cancer too.
... bring a doggie treat
Name the next dog in the program "Miggs."
2012
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57553262/doctor-dogs-being-trained-to-sniff-out-ovarian-cancer/
2009 (Can Dogs Sniff Out Cancer?)
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-703845.html
2006 (Dogs Excel In Cancer-Sniff Study)
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500368_162-1204680.html
every few years it pops up, but still nothing other than studies, perhaps its just a funding thing
In some cases I'd try and give the dog a run for its money.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I'll get a dog to determine if I have ovarian cancer. I'll get a cat to determine if I have a bacterial infection.
Because, when it doesn't work, there won't be any story in the news after the experiment.
A selection of cats said "Meh".
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
They are experts at sniffing crotches, after all. It's only a matter of time before they can also sniff out bowel and prostate cancers too.
Depends how often the user washes their hands I suppose.
Honestly, I'm as baffled as you are.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
There are no "generic symptoms on a healthy person" because by definition a symptom is an abnormality associated with disease. Generic symptoms are merely those that are associated with many possible underlying conditions. Headaches, fatigue, and fever, for example, aren't particularly diagnostically useful.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I have seen this on the Interweb.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I don't think you understand what generic means, at least not in this context.
Those are very generic symptoms, and healthy people, by definition, don't have symptoms.
But because of its generic symptoms â" weight gain, bloating or constipation â" the disease is more often caught late."
How are we supposed to tell the difference between the symptoms of ovarian cancer and the general appearance of large portions of the female population in the U.S.?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Garth Stein should claim Prior Art from "The Art of Racing in the Rain"
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
...why did they start out with a disease that can only affect 50% of the population?
haven't you ever heard of being asymptomatic?
It's not as graphic as you might imagine, but the scene still got cut in the US version.
Franco or D'Amato, I'm thinking, but I'm not really sure...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Oh c'mon, if you just want to get molested you can simply take a trip on an airplane.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A more relevant question is, "If the dogs can do it, why don't doctors and hospitals employ more of these dogs to carry out this function and save lives TODAY?"
Why? The short answer is: the number of hospitals and doctors' offices. That's why.
You're right that *maintaining* a dog doesn't cost much and isn't difficult. The difficulty lies in producing the dos.
Creating a dogs able to sniff the difference between a normal crotch and one with a hidden cancer in it takes training. Which is complex and long. That costs money and time. It's going to be pretty much difficult producing (training) enough dogs to cover the needs.
We're not speaking producing a few specialists dogs that the police or the FBI might use in a few specific operation against suspected drug dealers.
We're speaking about producing enough dogs to cover all the hospitals and doctors' offices to be used in routine screening.
That's not trivial to produce that much dogs. Simply put, the throughput of dog training centers isn't up to the task.
Whereas, once scientist have understood how to do it, e.g.: which peptide needs to be detected or whatever, reproducing the test doesn't require much resources. (just producing more of the necessary anti-bodies for the test or whatever). The capacity to build tests "en masse" is already out there, that's how its done for tons of other tests.
A way to see it your trading time/ressource of R&D vs. production.
The canine method has the advantage of very low R&D resources requirement (nature has already come up with dogs with a good sens of small. There's nothing much which needs to be invented actually) but high producing costs (you'll have to find a way to train that many dogs).
Whereas chemistry has a high R&D resources requirement (you need to discover makers and the best way to detect them) where are it has low productions requirement (fabrication of detection equipment is already scaled industrially).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It will take some rather nasty inhumane test to figure out if cancers in stage 1A will in fact become mortal. There is a lot of speculation and I believe even testing on lab animals to figure out how much of "early detected" will in fact develop into something more threatening. From what I understand, a significant amount of breast cancer growths will essentially "kill themselves" after a while in certain types of breast cancer. How much of this applies to other sorts of cancers is something that we don't have a lot of knowledge about yet. Animal testing might give us a clue, but unfortunately (or luckily), doing double blind tests to see what exact sorts of human cancers in what stage will develop into something worse and how many will disappear isn't going to happen.
Mind you, I'm not saying that we shouldn't treat cancer if it's not developed, but I'm trying to explain that we don't know the true statistics of "survival" from early detection, since we don't know the rate of survival in untreated patients. Statistics can be extremely hard to use properly and this is one of the cases where I think those percentages are not proven accurate.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Several variants fo lung cancer and skin cancer can already be detected by sniffer dogs.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Am I the only one with raised eyebrows, from line 1 of the summary? Dogs can sniff out mobile phones - this is just an accepted factoid now? How do the differentiate between a phone and say an electric li-ion shaver in your bag?
This is something I can speak to directly. My wife was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer 1 year ago this month. She is gone to intravenous chemo, surgery, and she is now on a yearlong oral chemo.
When she was diagnosed, what symptoms she had had shown up less than two weeks before. At the time, they consisted of cramping, constipation, and irritability. In other words, exactly the same symptoms she had exhibited once a month since puberty. By the time they found it, she had an 11 cm mass that had begun to metastasis into the abdominal wall. The symptoms themselves were actually caused by the 5 liters of fluid that had built up in her abdominal cavity.
As she is not of Eastern European Jewish descent and has no family history of cancer, there was absolutely no reason to suspect what was going on. Herein lies the problem with detection of this type of cancer, it just does not show any signs until it is well along. While I applaud the work in training canines to detect it, there is already a fairly accurate blood test to find ovarian cancer. For the canine route to be effective, pretty much every woman would have to be subjected to a crotch sniff from one of these canines.