Labrador can sniff out bowel cancer even in early stage

WASHINGTON - Dogs can sniff out bowel cancer, even in its early stages, in breath and stool samples with 95 percent accuracy, scientists say. They used a specially trained Labrador retriever to demonstrate the findings.

The findings suggest that chemical compounds for specific cancers circulate throughout the body, which opens up the prospect of developing tests to detect the disease before it spreads elsewhere.

The team included researchers from St. Sugar Cancer Sniffing Dog Training Centre Minamiboso, Chiba Prefecture in Japan, and Hideto Sonoda, assistant professor at Kyushu University, the journal Gut reports.

The specially trained Labrador retriever completed 74 sniff tests, each comprising five breath or stool samples at a time, only one of which was cancerous, over a period of several months, according to a Kyushu statement.

The samples came from 48 people with confirmed bowel cancer and 258 volunteers with no bowel cancer or who had had cancer in the past.

Around half of the volunteer samples came from people with bowel polyps, which although benign, are considered to be a precursor to bowel cancer.

And six percent of the breath samples and one in 10 of the stool samples from this group came from those with other gut problems, such as inflammatory bowel disease, ulcers and appendicitis.

The bowel cancer samples came from patients with varying stages of disease, including early stage.

The dog successfully identified which samples were cancerous, and which were not, in 33 out of 36 breath tests and in 37 out of 38 stool tests. The highest detection rates were among those samples taken from people with early stage disease.

This equates to 95 percent accuracy, overall, for the breath test and 98 percent accuracy for the stool test.

This indicates that there are specific discernible odours given off by cancer cells which circulate around the body, say the authors.