Black Lab Sniffs Out Bowel Cancer in Patients with Near-Perfect Accuracy
Remember when the Pentagon spent $19 billion to find the best possible bomb detector only to find out it was a dog? The same could be true for cancer diagnosis. After pouring countless dollars into high-tech diagnostic tools, dogs have exhibited a unique talent for accurately sniffing out biomarkers for a variety of cancers (bladder, lung, and breast cancers among them), and Japanese researchers are now reporting that their black labrador has added bowel cancer to that list. According to findings published in the aptly-named journal Gut, an eight-year-old female lab carried out 74 sniff tests over the course of several months, with each test comprised of five breath or stool samples. One of each five was from a cancerous subject, while the rest were from subjects who were cancer free or who had had cancer previously. The researchers even tried to fool the dog by including samples from subjects with...