The Speculist

A study from UK researches has shown that dogs could be used to help diagnose urinary tract cancer.

The authors trained six dogs of different breeds for 7 months to discriminate between urine from patients with bladder cancer and urine from those without cancer…

After training, each dog was offered seven urine samples--one bladder cancer sample and six comparison samples from individuals of the same sex…

Each dog underwent the test nine times. Altogether, the dogs correctly selected bladder cancer urine on 22 out of 54 occasions, an average success rate of 41% compared to 14% expected by chance alone…

Commenting on the paper, statistician Tim Cole from the Institute of Child Health in London notes that the study was carefully designed. "On balance the results are unambiguous," he writes in an accompanying commentary. "Dogs can be trained to recognize and flag an unusual smell in the urine of bladder cancer patients."

One sample that was thought to be disease-free kept testing positive with the dogs. The researchers went back and reexamined the volunteer. The volunteer had kidney cancer.

Last November it was announced that drug dogs might one day be made obsolete by "dog-on-a-chip" technology. This computer chip would, in effect, give police officers the benefit of a drug dog in a convenient PDA package.

Now that it has been proven that urinary cancer can be detected with dogs, can a medical version of the "dog-on-a-chip" be far behind?