Dogs sniff out bladder cancer

Dogs can be trained to identify people with bladder cancer. In a proof of principle study, Willis and colleagues (p 712) trained six dogs to discriminate between urine from patients with bladder cancer and urine from diseased and healthy controls. They found that at the end of seven months of training the dogs were able to select the urine of patients with cancer 41% of the time, whereas the success rate expected by chance alone was 14%.

Figure 1.

Credit: GK@VIKKI HART/PHOTONICA