Sniffing Out Cancer With Electronic Noses

An anonymous reader writes "We may soon be able to obtain easy and early diagnoses of diseases by smell. This week researchers found one odor-sniffing machine was as good as a mammogram at detecting breast cancer — and many other devices capable of spotting other diseases may be on the way."

Comments

Re:As good as mammogram

[Sockatume]

The issue with mammograms is inappropriate mass screening; they're still a useful diagnostic tool, and have a benefit in routine screening in high-risk populations. If this device has the same false positive/negative rate as mammograms but is less intrusive and doesn't involve X-ray, that'd improve the benefits for those groups even futher.

Now, there is a related issue that any more-convenient diagnostic tool runs an even higher risk of being overapplied.

Early Detection

[johnnyb]

The problem with early detection is that many diseases are actually benign in their early stages, and, when detected, their detection can actually cause more harm for the patient. For instance, early cancer detection increases the likelihood that the patient will start chemo. Some cancers wind up being handled by the body, but *all* chemo treatments harm patients. So, early detection sometimes leads to more harm than benefit (plus an unfortunate issue with "success" rates - the cancer treatments get to include in their "success" count cancers that the body would have cleaned up anyway).

Re:Dogs have been able to do this forever

[CanHasDIY]

I've seen demos (albeit on TV documentations) of dogs having been trained for cancer detection. While I can see it might be a boon in third world countries, where folks tend not be to as uptight as most are on this side of the pond, I don't see it catching on in the U.S. I just can't imagine folks laying on a table (the kind where each arm and leg is supported separately) in their skivvies and letting Toto go for a bit of a walk while he sniffs your wobbly bits.

Here's the thing I've noticed about people's reactions to cancer-sniffing dogs: It's not the 'dog sniffing your junk' part that bothers most people, it's the whole "finding out you have some sort of cancer." My wife used to work at a vet clinic that had a cancer-sniffer as a regular patient, and some patrons (who knew of the terrier's powers) would go out of their way to stay as far away from the dog as possible, presumably because they didn't want to know.

BTW, having personally observed the abilities of some canines to sniff out things like cancerous tumors? Mind-blowing; would probably be doubly so if I weren't so well-read about dogs.