At a recent “Medical Innovations Summit” at the Royal Society of Medicine we had the opportunity to hear some interesting lectures by people from different parts of the world. One of them was about using Medical Detection Dogs for diagnosing and alerting doctors and patients of various medical conditions like Cancer Prostate, dangerous levels of Hypoglycaemia in Type 1 diabetes and Cancer Breast.

It was an interesting presentation by Dr Claire Guest who is a scientist and Animal Behaviour Expert. She explained how good the dogs are with their sense of smell and how their organisation was using this to train them in detecting cancer of prostate by smelling the urine and detecting hypoglycaemia through breath of patients during sleep. A video that accompanied the lecture showed a dog waking a patient during the middle of the night when her blood sugar dropped to a dangerous level!

In one study 6500 urine samples were checked by a trained dog. It detected Ca prostate in 500 samples. The success rate being about 98%. Dr Guest explained that it took them 4 weeks to train a dog and the average overall cost was about £10,000 per dog. They have now started on a programme to train them like the guide dogs. I am sure we are going to hear a lot more about this in the future.