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Dogs can smell cancer

Japanese researchers yesterday reported that a specially trained black labrador retriever could detect bowel cancer in human breath and stool samples with up to 98 per cent accuracy - a much better result than the faecal occult blood test currently used for screening in Australia.

They said that although the discovery was unlikely to lead to dogs working routinely in laboratories, it showed that cancer had a discernible odour that could be used to develop a new diagnostic test.

In a report on the finding in the journal Gut, the team from Kyushu University said they used a specially trained eight-year-old female dog to perform sniff tests of breath and stool samples from more than 306 volunteers, including 48 people with bowel cancer.

Before the study, the dog was rewarded with tennis ball play when she picked cancerous breath samples from five others on offer.

About half of the remaining 258 volunteer samples came from people with bowel polyps, which, although benign, are considered to be a precursor of bowel cancer.

Six per cent of the breath samples and one in 10 of the stool samples from this group came from those with other problems, such as inflammatory bowel disease, ulcers, diverticulitis and appendicitis - problems that could cause bleeding.

The researchers said that in breath tests the dog successfully identified cancer in 33 out of 36 cancer sufferers (a 95 per cent success rate), and in stool tests 37 out of 38 sufferers (98 per cent success). The highest detection rates were among samples taken from people with early-stage disease.

The researchers said the dog was more effective at picking up bowel cancer than the faecal occult blood test, which picks up early-stage bowel cancer in about one in 10 cases.

Dr Trevor Lockett, the theme leader on colorectal cancer and gut health at the CSIRO Preventative Health National Research Flagship, said the finding was fascinating given that current non-invasive tests for bowel cancer detect later-stage disease far more efficiently than early-stage.

''Detection of early-stage cancers is the real holy grail in bowel cancer diagnosis because surgery can cure up to 90 per cent of patients who present with early-stage disease. Cure rates decrease dramatically as the cancers become more advanced,'' he said.