“I saved Paddy’s life by taking him in because he was an abandoned puppy. In his turn, he just saved mine.” Karin Gibson, a 62-year-old Briton residing in Portsmouth is still blown away. When she returned from a fortnight’s vacation last August and found her 5-year-old black Labrador, she was intrigued by her change in behavior. “Paddy is an affectionate dog but this time he had become a real glue pot. He kept hopping on my knees as soon as I was seated, sniffing my breath and looking me in the eyes with his paw still resting on the side. same place on my chest At first I thought he was happy to see us again but after 3 weeks he was still pushing and I started to feel pain in my right breast. I made up my mind to go see my general practitioner “she said explained to the BBC.
The dog is able to “sniff” cancer
The doctor ordered a mammogram, then a biopsy and the diagnosis fell, confirming that Karin Gibson had an invasive tumor in her right breast. “But thanks to Paddy, the tumor was detected early. So I’m positive about the rest,” she adds a few days after the tumor was removed.
Karin Gibson and her husband have two other dogs (another Labrador and an English setter) but Paddy is the only one who “sniffed” the presence of cancer.
With its 200 million olfactory cells, the dog’s nose is able to detect extremely volatile odors. However, many cancers produce volatile molecules that the dog could learn to detect. In 2011, German researchers discovered that dogs could detect the presence of lung cancer by sniffing the breath of people with this disease. And more recently, in 2015, a team from the University of Arkansas took trained male german shepherd, to detect thyroid cancer.
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