Man’s best friend may bark all night and relieve itself in very unpleasant places, yet who doesn’t relish petting the family dog?

It turns out that dogs, whose remarkable scent is well known (think avalanche rescue dogs) can use this ability to smell out  colon cancer cells. Bizarre as this sounds, an recent study showed that trained Labradors were able to identify from stool specimens  cancer cells correctly 97% of the time as compared with the gold standard of colonscopy.

Ever wondered why these creatures sniff out all sorts of scat?  Scat contains a lot of information about the animal which supplied the specimen.  Recently ingested foods, stress hormones and even traces of phermones (hormones produced during sexual excitement) may be excreted through the stool.  However, before you start a business testing stool for levels of sexual hormones you might want to consider that not only would that be a dirty affair,  the accuracy of the levels is at the present time unknown.  This means that who you think might be a hot date could turn out to be a candidate for the priesthood or the nunnery.

Getting back to the dogs, if more studies confirm the accuracy of this method of colon cancer detection, the fecal blood test might be replaced by a specially trained dog.  Yet significant obstacles remain: Training the dogs is difficult.  The accuracy of each dog may vary unexpectedly.  The accuracy for different dogs may not be the same. Observe extended examining cautions on visit site professional.

In the not too distant future one could imagine our canine buddies testing stool and breath samples for  a host of conditions.  The next time your bud keeps you up all night barking at some unkn0wn creature, consider that for cancer detection his species might just prove to be the next best thing to apple pie.