Dogs can sniff out lung cancer with near-perfect accuracy, new research claims.
Scientists first suggested training dogs to sniff out cancer back in 1989, and in the last several years, many studies have explored the ability of dogs to find melanoma, lung, breast and bladder cancers.
One Alabama woman has taken it upon herself to train local and visiting dogs into medical assistants, of sorts.
Cindy Roberts, who has been training dogs professionally since 1982 shifted her focus to the animals' hyper-sensitive noses when her own mother died, just six days following her lung cancer diagnosis.
Her vow to her mother was to help others catch cancer sooner, in the hopes their survival chances might be better.
And according to the new study from Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine-Bradenton Campus, dogs like Cindy's might do that less expensively an with equal or greater accuracy, than lab and machine testing can.
Cindy Roberts has trained her own dog, Nibbler, a nine-year-old long-coated Chihuahua to sniff out cancer. A new study suggests dogs can detect the disease with 97 percent accuracy
Cancer screening and diagnostics have come a long way, but they're far from perfect.
Improving them is essential, as an early diagnosis is often the difference between life and death.
That's particularly true for non-small cell lung cancer.
If the cancer is caught in its earliest stages, before the disease spreads, the five-year survival rate is 60 percent.
But it's hard to detect, as many people have no symptoms and if a person does develop symptoms, they tend to be mild ones, such as a persistent cough.
Once the disease has reached its more advanced stages, metastisizing to neighboring regions of the body, five-year survival drops to one-third.
By the time signs of the cancer are far flung throughout the body, the chance of surviving for five years drops to six percent.
Imaging like CAT scans, CT scans, X-rays and PET scans are used to try to detect the disease before a biopsy is analyzed under a microscope to make the final diagnosis.
But these tests are not totally reliable, and can be extremely expensive, costing anywhere between $270 and $5,000.
Cindy knows just how unhelpful these tests can be.
By the time her mother's lung cancer (it's unclear if it was SCLC or another form) was diagnosed in 2014, it was too late for treatment to save her.
Cindy has been training dogs since 1989, but shifted her focus to cancer detection after her own mother's death in 2014
The six days between her mother's diagnosis and her death were barely enough time for Cindy and other loved-ones to say their goodbyes.
Her mother had survived both melanoma and breast cancer, but late detection made lung cancer an un-winnable fight for her.
'She said "I've had a good life, I've enjoyed these six days," but I told her that if I can ever be in a position here I can help someone to have ore than six days, I will,' Cindy says.
'I wanted to do something - I guess I'm just stingy, I wanted more than six days.'
Cindy had been training dogs to obey their owners and more
