Specially trained sniffer dogs can smell something on the breath of lung cancer patients.
Dogs will sniff anything and everything, and can even tell identical twins apart by scent
. And tumors, you may be surprised to learn, have their own very faint smells. To figure out how to diagnose internal cancers that are frequently overlooked until too late from just a breath sample, scientists have been working with dogs to see if these smells can be reliably differentiated from, say, the smell of breakfast, that last cigarette, or emphysema. In previous studies, dogs have already shown their scent savvy in detecting established cases of ovarian cancer
, melanoma
, breast cancer, and lung cancer
. In the latest study
, which investigated how well dogs could make a diagnosis in the presence of other scents on a patient's breath, canine breathalyzers not only smelled lung cancer ...
