If you still had doubts about the many potentials of our four-legged friends, today you will be particularly amazed by what they are capable of doing. Recently, in fact, a study has revealed that dogs, through their highly developed sense of smell, are able to sniff out cancerwith an accuracy of 97%.
Yet our faithful animals have a sense of smell much more sophisticated than ours, which has only 5 million olfactory receptors, compared to about 300 million of which dogs are endowedwhich, also for this reason, are able to process olfactory information more quickly compared to the human brain.
A group of researchers from the University of Kyushu, Japan, found this following an experiment conducted on five dogs trained to detect colon cancer. Only through the smell of the breath of 48 patients, chosen as samples, the dogs have shown themselves capable of distinguish those who were sick and those who were healthyachieving an accuracy of 97%.
One cannot yet think, of course, that dogs can match the reliability of cancer screening tests or even replace them. Although the study bodes well, it is necessary to conduct further research on their olfactory abilities, to understand if in the future these could represent a valid and effective solution for the early detection of cancer on a large scale.
In any case, the work carried out by the aforementioned scholars was able to demonstrate theimportance of animals in early detection of the disease, so as to ensure timely intervention. Training dogs for this purpose could improve the accuracy of screenings and avoid a good rate of false positives. The hypothesis of a potential use of dogs in the diagnosis of cancer is still only in the experimental stage, but the results achieved so far are interesting and promising.
So, who knows, maybe one day our beloved and faithful four-legged friends will be able to work alongside doctors and be useful for our health, as well as to make us happy every day! Is it or is it not a valid reason to be even more grateful to him?