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How Your Four-Legged Best Friend Could Save Your Life

By Hope Reveche

You know that loveable goofball who eats like there’s no tomorrow, gives you slobbery kisses at any chance they get, and might even “paw” you if you aren’t giving them enough attention? Yeah, that one. While your dog might be a mischievous ball of unpredictable energy at times, their noses are able to sniff out something wrong in the human body way before we are even aware of a problem. With about 44 times as many odor receptors as humans, their extremely acute sense of smell can be used to prevent medical issues before they become worse and just might be able to save a life. 

There are numerous cases of dogs smelling out problems in their owner’s bodies and warning them. One notable case was when the founder of Magic Mission hound rescue, Lauren Gauthier’s dog, Victoria, continuously investigated what Gauthier thought to be a pimple on her nose. Because her dog was persistently sniffing and wouldn’t leave the spot alone, Gauthier decided to see her doctor and was later diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma which is a common type of skin cancer. Although this is not a particularly serious type of cancer if caught early, it potentially could have caused some other medical problems if Victoria hadn’t “told” her owner. 

The scientific community is no stranger to using dogs as service animals. They’ve been around starting from the 1920s as seeing dogs for the blind, and since then have served as emotional support, mobility assistance, and even allergy assistance animals . However, it was only in 2006 that in-depth research started investigating their ability to smell serious medical conditions like cancer. In this first significant study, dogs were trained to distinguish cancer samples from control samples. To signal to the researchers when they identified a cancer sample, they sat or laid down in front of it. For the control sample, they were trained to ignore it. The results showed that these dogs were able to sniff out breast and lung cancer from patients’ breath samples with an 88 and 99% accuracy, respectively. What was even more impressive was that they could identify patients with cancer in all four stages. In later studies, they were trained to use blood samples and again, passed with flying colors. Although more extensive research needs to be done in this field, it is believed that dogs are able to smell small odor changes in cancer patient cells due to elevated levels of volatile organic compounds which are present in these diseased cells.  

Not only can dogs sniff out cancer, but they are also notably known for being able to predict “medical episodes” like narcoleptic attacks, blood sugar emergencies, and migraines. Similar to cancer, dogs are able to smell changes in certain chemicals in the body: for migraines, serotonin levels spike drastically and isoprene rises when a person’s blood sugar is low. Dogs being able to identify this change and quickly notify their humans is incredibly useful since it gives the people time to prepare for the effects of their condition by getting to a safe place or position or taking medication. 

Although dogs have been taught to effectively identify things like cancer and low blood sugar, there is still some skepticism whether or not it is effective for seizures. It is common for people to have seizure alert dogs, but because there are different causes of seizures including psychological and epileptic seizures, it’s difficult to determine which population of patients would benefit most from having these animals. A study done in 2019 showed that dogs were able to identify a “seizure odor,” however, not all of them were able to differentiate between the specific types of seizures. Treatments depend heavily on the type of seizure so it is important that more studies be done to figure out ways to increase the reliability and accuracy of dogs predicting this event.  

 Though we are unsure whether using dogs for seizures is effective or not, research continues in this field. A recent experiment in Finland has shown promising results as 6 dogs have successfully been able to use skin samples to identify COVID-19 in people up to 5 days before any symptoms appear. They have been able to reach an almost 100% accuracy rate, which allows the country to provide thorough safety measures for people traveling here and native residents. This trial demonstrates the massive range that dogs and their noses have. In the future, they could potentially be used to foresee a heart attack or pinpoint Alzheimer’s disease in a patient. There are many directions that this research has yet to explore, so much potential that these good boys (and girls) have. So the next time you see your dog, maybe give them a nice belly rub or toss them an extra treat. You never know if they’ll be saving your life someday.