Dogs can help sniff cancer, though sounds incredible, this research has made a huge steep forward these years. Today, the “Cancer sniffing dogs project” has been approved by British NHS, entering into the testing phase, in order to further validate this uncanny ability of dogs.

Actually, the ability of dogs to smell cancer is well documented. A 1989 report marked the first medical record of this ability. And the following studies have quantified how skilled dogs are at detecting different cancers including lung, breast and bladder cancers. To our surprise, they can do this just by smelling the patient’s breath.

So how’s it going now? The institution has been training sniffer dogs to screen the smell of urine samples of prostate cancer. And the tests showed that sniffer dogs can detect prostate cancer in 93 percent accuracy rate.

One of the researchers said: over the past years, lots of claims have been made that dogs can “smell” cancer. And this was based on the say that volatile molecules would go into urine and it has a special smell. Compared to the conventional cancer detecting method, urine sample is much more easier for collection and test.

Scientists plan to carry out this “sniffer gods” test in the following three years. And they decided to make 9 trained dogs to screen urine samples from 3,000 patients. Those 9 “dog doctor” include six Labrador, two Springer Spaniel and a Hungarian Wisla dogs.

After skin cancer, Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers for men in United States and the United Kingdom. Only in 2011, the British had check out more than 41,700 cases of prostate cancer cases.

Is sniffer dog really alternative to traditional prostate cancer screening? Nobody knows how sniffer dogs can be applied in clinical, nor do we know whether it is suitable for large-scale promotion. But, researchers believe that at least this detection can be the second line of defense. Sniffer dogs can improve the accuracy of cancer screening, avoiding the unnecessary testing that false positives have brought to the patients.

Besides UK, sniffer dog research has also made positive progress in other countries. In 2014, an Italian study results show the accuracy of 677 urine samples detection for dogs is 98%.

Typically, six moths of training can foster a reliable cancer detect expert. If this can be applied into clinical usage, patients would have less sufferings during the detection. But further studies are still needed.