Dogs and Cancer

The sense of smell is a dog’s primary sense. Sniffing allows dogs to take in air quickly to specifically identify the odor several meters away. Their sense of smell is extremely sensitive with over 220 million smell-sensitive cells within their nose compared to only 5 million in humans.

For this reason, dogs readily assist us in the community to track everything from people to drugs to explosives.

It's no surprise that dogs may have a use in human medicine. It has been fairly well documented that dogs can detect low blood sugar in diabetics. A recent study by the Pine Street Foundation in California has demonstrated a dog’s ability to detect lung and breast cancer in humans based on breath samples.