Dogs are certainly man's best friend. Besides keeping us safe by sniffing bombs and illegal drugs, they are also proving themselves useful in the world of medicine, including smelling diseases like thyroid cancer.
This is the premise of a new study conducted in Little Rock, Arkansas. A team studying thyroid cancer has been getting some help from Frankie, a German shepherd mix.
Thyroid cancer affects over 60,000 people in the United States every year, according to American Cancer Society. Annually, at least 1,900 of them die. The survival rate is very high, and one of the reasons is effective screening and detection. For example, ultrasounds have become more advanced they can spot small nodules that may be less visible in the past.
Like in other types of cancer, if there are tumors present, the doctor will then request for a biopsy to determine if they're malignant or benign. However, sometimes the results can be so unclear and the margin of error high that patients are subjected to more uncomfortable and even painful tests.
The researchers wondered if there's another way to increase the accuracy of results and thus have turned their attention to dogs.
A number of cancer-related studies have pointed out on the benefits of dogs and their ability to smell cancer such as melanoma and breast cancer. Thus, it's not entirely probable they'll do the same thing with thyroid cancer.
For their study, they exposed Frankie to the "smell" of thyroid cancer by letting him sniff on diseased tissue samples. Then they trained him to lie down, as dogs do when they smell bombs or drugs, if he smells cancer in any of the urine samples from patients. Of the 34 samples, he's able to correctly detect 32. This means the dog has an accuracy level of 90%.
Of course, Frankie can't still be used in a real medical setting, and the researchers need to perform more studies. However, they are also not closing their doors on the many opportunities this research presents, such as cheaper but more accurate method of screening early-stage thyroid cancers.