Can Dogs Smell Cancer?

Email to a Friend Darren September 17th, 2007

Carolyn Withers is convinced that her dog Myles saved her life.

In September 1999 she says her normally laid-back Labrador retriever started jumping, barking and poking his nose under her arm, near her right breast. At first she thought nothing of it. Then one night, she could no longer ignore him.

“I had gone to bed and Myles actually lunged right onto the bed, and he never did that,” Withers said. “And he, you know, dodged right towards my arm area, and started barking. He was in a panic. And that’s when all of a sudden I felt this real fear.”

After doing a breast self-examination, she found what felt like a small pearl. She says she knew immediately that it was cancer. Withers had surgery and is now fine.

Was it coincidence? Did Myles really detect the cancer? Is this possible? Manhattan veterinarian Andrew Kaplan said we’d be amazed at the information a dog’s nose might provide because “a dog has approximately 220 million smell receptors in their nose, and people have about 5 million.”

So what are dogs smelling and how accurate can they actually be at detecting cancer? What is truly amazing is that the dogs trained to spot cancer “nailed it 90 percent of the time in thousands of trials” according to a study in the journal Integrative Cancer Therapies.

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