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If Dogs Can Smell Cancer, Why Don't They Screen People? (scientificamerican.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Scientific American report: Dogs can be trained to be cancer-sniffing wizards, using their sensitive noses to detect cancerous fumes wafting from diseased cells. This sniffing is noninvasive and could help diagnose countless people, which begs the question: If these pups are so olfactorily astute, why aren't they screening people for cancer right now? Here's the short answer: Dogs do well in engaging situations, such as helping law enforcement track scents or guiding search-and-rescue teams in disaster areas. But sniffing thousands of samples in which only a handful may be cancerous is challenging work with little positive reinforcement. Moreover, it takes time and energy to train these pups, who, despite extensive preparation, still might miss a diagnosis if they're having a bad day, experts told Live Science.
If this is true, than something is being emanated into the air and can be detected by a man-made sensor.
Rapid cell division emits a hormone which the dogs smell, which is why they will confuse pregnancy for cancer.
You can't patent dogs and create a monopoly.
This sounds like quite a survival trait. The dog is acting as part of the human's immune system!
I wonder if there was any selection preference for dogs who keep their humans alive longer?
Sure seems like there would have been; possibly still might be.
> to detect cancerous fumes wafting from diseased cells
TIL cancer cells smoke cigarettes! In more serious tone, that isn't why there is a detectable chemical change. More terrible /. headlines.
Drug sniffing dogs mostly respond to the officers' body language telling them to start barking to establish probable cause. Actually training them to respond to the smells is hard.
Moreover, it takes time and energy to train these pups, who, despite extensive preparation, still might miss a diagnosis if they're having a bad day, experts told Live Science.
All screening tests have false positives and false negatives. That's why they are screening tests. A good screening test is cheap, fast, and has few (close to zero) false negatives and a modest number of false positives. Anyone with a positive test gets sent to follow up with more accurate and costly testing.
That said the article is right in that dogs really aren't sufficiently reliable. Same problems exist with search and rescue dogs. If it isn't fun for them even the best dogs get bored and stop cooperating. A better approach would be to try to figure out what the scent is and to develop a mechanical nose to replicate the functionality. The dogs should be sufficiently reliable to help development of a sensor.
If dogs became mainstream at detecting cancers, there would be immediate palpable disruption to the present status quo. Schools that train doctors, radiologists and the whole associated ecosystem would be in peril.
Nice try but no. Under the best of circumstances dogs wouldn't be more than a cheap form of screening which would have to be confirmed by other more reliable methods of detection. Screening tests are useful but don't replace entire ecosystems of medicine. At most dogs can tell us that something is going on in the patient but they cannot provide much in the way of details.
Who in this industry, would support such a move? I do not see any.
My wife is a pathologist and she would happily support dogs being used to detect cancers if it were a practical and reliable approach. Nearly all doctors are more than happy to utilize any tool that will get better results for their patients. Your cynicism is misplaced.
The same can be said for drugs and we still use dogs for that.
That's because it is a hard problem to solve and dogs are exquisitely evolved to detect scents. Learning to replicate even a fraction of that functionality will take many years of hard work. And yes, top people are working on it.
Bees are just as good as dogs at sniffing things, including drugs and explosives.
You train the hive ONCE, and they train each other after that.
Unlike dogs, they have much longer working rules. They don't need as much rest or reward.
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" Dogs do well in engaging situations, such as helping law enforcement track scents" Actually, not so. Ask the innumerable people accused of having drugs who didn't. The dog wants to please its handler, who wants to hear there's something there, and needs to be able to say his illegal search wasn't because the dog "signaled".
begs the question
Nope.
PLONK
That is not begging the question.
What are dogs smelling in the air when they detect cancer? Obviously not the cancer cells themselves, it must be a mixture of volatile compounds that could be detected with mass spectroscopy or other technique on the spot. Certainly less invasive than a biopsy...
love is just extroverted narcissism
Just wondering if Larry Ellison could offer an opinion...
You think that, once a dog says that you have cancer, that's it? You don't need oncologists? You don't need radiologists? You don't need nurses?
The cancer dog sniffs you, wags his tail a certain way that means you have Leukemia, you take a Leukemia pill and that's it?
Have you had any experience with the medical profession at all?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
"But sniffing thousands of samples in which only a handful may be cancerous is challenging work with little positive reinforcement. Moreover, it takes time and energy to train these pups, who, despite extensive preparation, still might miss a diagnosis if they're having a bad day, experts told Live Science."
Next mystery: why do I get wet every time I have a shower?
If cynicism is truly misplaced here, care to tell me why the fuck we haven't evolved in other areas of detection where we still use dogs?
Because we haven't got better technology yet. You seem to be under the delusion that scent detection is an easy thing to do. It isn't. Replicating even a fraction of a dog's nose is a problem as difficult as replicating human visual recognition. We've had some results but we're still not very good at it yet. There is lots of money to be made with artificial noses so I have little doubt it will get figured out eventually but until then we have to work with what we've got and what we've got are dogs.
Using "sniffing thousands of samples in which only a handful...is challenging work with little positive reinforcement" as an excuse to not use dogs to screen cancer seems pretty damn weak when that is essentially exactly what drug and bomb sniffing dogs are doing all day, every day.
We can do it if you are willing to indemnify the doctors for the results just like the police are indemnified against being sued for false positives and false negatives. Right now if the dog misses the diagnosis the doctor is the one who will be sued. Police use dogs because they work (even if imperfectly) and they are effectively immune to liability for useing them.
Your wife does not directly speak for the trillions made by the cancer industry.
She doesn't have to. The claim was that no one in the industry would support using dogs to detect cancer which is a claim that is demonstrably false.
This sniffing is noninvasive and could help diagnose countless people, which begs the question:
It raises the question. It does not beg the question.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
If dogs are cancer-smelling machines, then every single dog in my local dog park must have cancer of the ass.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Um, why would they be in peril? Their job is to cure cancer. If a new tool helps them find more cancers earlier, they'll have more cancers to cure (as opposed to cancers that aren't found until it's too late and kill people).
Dr: Please step right into this room full of adorable puppy dogs.
vs
Dr: Please step into this room FULL OF BEES.
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The summary describes the question, then provides the answer!
Ken
Why do we treat smell as though it's some sort of metaphysical sixth sense that cannot be replicated by something man-made?
Dogs can do amazing things, but they have approximately the same attention-span and cognitive function as a 2 year-old human--so maybe let's not trust cancer diagnosis to them.
Schools that train doctors, radiologists and the whole associated ecosystem would be in peril.
Right, because once a dog 'detects' cancer in a person, there's no need for trained medical professionals (AKA doctors, radiologists, etc) - you just open a book that decodes the dog barks into a treatment plan then have Amazon drop-ship you a complete med kit to combat the cancer...
Detecting cancer =/= treating cancer.
Ken
It'd certainly cut down on the number of hypochondriacs wasting doctors' time...
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Because you have the potential for a ton of false positives that cause mental anguish of "do I have cancer" and related testing to rule out an actual positive.
The role the dog (or bees, or what have you) play currently is probably the right one, used only when needed and validated with other methods with higher precision.
Majority of people that get cancer defeat it with zero or minimal symptoms. (literally everyone over about 5-10, in fact)
The 1/3~ that get ill, treated or sadly die, do not.
Over-diagnosis has become a growing concern with cancer detection because it means people going through absolutely unnecessary treatments when it would go away on its own, or is just inactive and has pretty much no chance of ever becoming active.
I'd be worried that this would cause a massive explosion in not only false-positives, but also over-diagnosis in people that can naturally defeat it.
Why most people can defeat it is still ongoing research.
Diet, genetics and environment all seem to show equal amounts of correlations.
Modern (or rather, "western") diets are hugely carcinogenic. Largely to due using shit like vegetable oils and burning them in the production of ready-meals, which are basically responsible for western illness. Anywhere it is introduced, all these illnesses come with it. (even happening to remote areas in polar regions now!)
This leads to chronic inflammation and exhaustion of resources which might lead to cancer gaining momentum where it normally wouldn't.
A pretty big one seems to be tied to the sub-species you are part of. Some have a higher expression of cancer rates. Another I remember seeing showed high genetic drift between parents leading to issues because of higher differences of mutations. Some are just outright incompatible and catastrophically fail over time.
Equally environmental issues have exploded since industrialization, but not because of what most people think (fumes of toxic chemicals), but actually because of particulate matter in the air, regardless of source. Ultra-fine particles can get through the blood-air barriers as well as the blood-brain barrier. These particles are in silly-high amounts in homes especially because they aren't exposed to open air currents which would normally clear them out.
This is an issue caused by poor house design in certain regions, which has been linked to issues with breathing and recently cancer. Basic lack of ventilation is a huge issue for lung health. Cases of people having FUNGAL GROWTHS in their lungs are through the roof in recent decades. It's scary.
Modern life is just incompatible with biology. It has to change.
Of course, it won't. We'll just use Crispr or some future system to cure it and let life around us die of horrific disease instead.
citation: "But sniffing thousands of samples in which only a handful may be cancerous is challenging work with little positive reinforcement."
changed: "But sniffing thousands of samples in which mostly all are not cancerous is -still- challenging work with much positive reinforcement."
-> Train the dogs to _not_ react on cancerous people.
Imagine if a dog without a PhD was given a job.
I've heard rats being used in Africa for diagnosis, I don't remember the disease though.
They don't have to be 100% accurate,, just equal to the current faulty ways.
It doesn't "beg the question." Check your dictionary (despite the overwhelmingly incorrect use of that phrase.)
Doug Jensen
When sniffing for cancer, you can't exactly say "Good boy. This poor man has cancer, here's a treat!". You can't base a diagnosis on the reaction of dog, and certainly not in front of the patient. The cancer would have to be verified by biopsy or other means, which if course takes time. Praising the dog for what they did days ago doesn't teach them anything.
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If the whole population were screened, the amount of found cases would erase the healthcare illusion we have. We simply don't have that much money but we still want to pretend we don't leave people to die.
So, the end result is that we don't want to look for cancer.
We don't have dog cancer tests yet, but we do have CAT scans!
Did Stephen King write this?
Obviously the dogs are reacting to *something* in the air. Why can't a sensor be created that detects the same chemicals/biological items in the air?
It's because if they detect if early enough who will pay the big bills for long term cancer treatment and ultimately death?
No, it's because dogs can key off of subtle, hard to detect signals from their handlers, and then "detect" the drugs and explosives which are carried by the people with the wrong skin color.
Do you have a better scent detecting technology available? If not, shut up until you do. In any case the issues with drug sniffing dogs have nothing to do with cancer detection.
So since a dog might still miss a diagnosis, we should not use them at all. And if one life can be saved by taking away all guns, we should take them all away. If one life can be saved from a drunk driver, we should re-institute prohibition. If democrats loose an election, we should immediately try to save ourselves by moving to impeach the Republican winner. Sick liberal ideology.