Dogs Can be Trained to Detect Health Conditions
Our canine friends have an enormous number of scent receptors, around 220 million. No wonder, they are legendary for their olfactory sense. How dogs scent medical conditions Dogs can notice the slightest of changes in human bodies caused by various systems including hormonal changes and any volatile organic compounds that our bodies release. The great news is that scientists and dog trainers are finding out how dogs smell the medical conditions in us and trying to figure out how to translate this into healthcare. The following are just a few of the many health conditions that dogs can be trained to help with. Diabetic symptoms Dogs can help people with diabetes realize that they are experiencing blood sugar levels hiking or dropping. Human breath has a natural chemical called isoprene that rises notably when a person with diabetes is going through a period of low blood sugar which dogs can detect. Trained dogs will alert their owners and give them time to take their insulin when they see that their blood test confirms the warning as accurate. Dogs do improve quality of life and safety of their handlers. Detection of cancer Many different types of cancer are detectable to dogs, including breast and skin cancer. Cancerous cells produce a very specific odor. In fact, in late stages of the disease, even human noses can detect it. With a sense of smell researchers estimate is between 10,000 and 100,000 times superior to ours, dogs can detect this smell far earlier in the disease’s progress—even while the cancer is still “in situ,” or has not spread from the site where it was first formed. And remarkably, they don’t need to smell the growth directly. Dogs can detect this scent on waste matter like breath. Neurological disorders and brain disruptions Dogs can be trained to sense disorders that affect your brain and nervous system. The human body sends out hormones through your sweat, and the dogs can pick up the changes in your scent. People prone to migraine attacks will release serotonin a couple of hours before the headache. People suffering from fear and anxiety will release the hormones adrenaline and cortisol. Patients with the brain disorder, narcolepsy, suffer from extreme sleepiness and delusions and can fall instantly asleep without warning. Final thoughts We are so familiar with dogs being our pets, our companions and our family that we are only now realizing how much they help us with personal health challenges is
Dogs Can be Trained to Detect and Assist with Medical Conditions
Dogs are capable of noticing the slightest of changes in human bodies through scent — and we're just beginning to discover their capabilities. It's estimated that dogs have a sense of smell that is 10,000 to 100,000 times better than ours. James Walker, the former director of the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University, who's team rigorously tested dog's scenting ability explains, "if you make the analogy to vision, what you and I can see at a third of a mile, a dog could see more than 3,000 miles away and still see as well." Here's an overview of how dogs can be trained to detect and assist with medical conditions. How dogs' sense of smell can assist with medical conditions Dogs are capable of noticing the slightest of changes in human bodies caused by various systems including, hormonal changes and any volatile organic compounds that our bodies release from, for example, cancer cells. The great news is that scientists and dog trainers are leaning more and more about how dogs smell and applying training techniques to sniff out and assist with medical conditions. Assisting with diabetes Dogs can be trained to help people with diabetes realize that they are experiencing blood sugar levels spiking or dropping. Scientists have discovered that human breath has a natural chemical called isoprene that rises notably when a person with type 1 diabetes is going through a period of low blood sugar, also known as hypoglycemia. With training, dogs can alert their owners and give them time to take their insulin when they see that their blood test confirms the warning as accurate. Detection of cancer Heather Junqueira, researcher at BioScentDx conducted a study titled, "A highly sensitive test for detecting cancer could potentially save thousands of lives and change the way the disease is treated." She present this research at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology annual meeting during the 2019 Experimental Biology meeting. Junqueira and her team used a a type of clicker training to teach four beagles to distinguish between normal blood serum and samples from patients with malignant lung cancer. Three of the four dogs correctly identified lung cancer samples 96.7 percent of the time and normal samples 97.5 percent of the time. "This work is very exciting because it paves the way for further research along two paths, both of which could lead to new cancer-detection tools," Junqueira explained. "One is using canine scent