My wife JUST HATES IT when our springer sticks his nose in her butt when
she bends over to pull up her pants etc...And in thinking this is the
likely avenue a mutt might use on men to try to discover pCa? Hope those
getting "inspected" have a sense of humor and can tolerate a cold nose!

Philski

I did a little searching, and ignoring the many articles that appeared to be
spin-offs of the work the 60 Minutes report was based on, found an article
about untrained dogs detecting melanoma.

http://www.exn.ca/dogs/nose.cfm

Here is an article from the San Francisco Chronicle, June 1, 2003. Among the
cancers discussed are breast, skin, lung, and prostate. The work is still in
its infancy, and the training techniques resemble those used to train
bomb-sniffing dogs.

http://tinyurl.com/5ew2k

There are many more articles out there. These are just the first wot I
grabbed. This work has been going on for years; the significant thing about
the recent British study is that it was conducted with double-blind research
protocols and published in a refereed journal. Thus, earlier work, however
significant, is considered "informal" or "anecdotal."

How these techniques might be used in clinical practice is difficult to
foresee. Trained dogs might find a place in mass screenings, for example. I
doubt whether crotch-sniffing will ever replace the finger-wave or biopsies,
or that the Dog Scan will ever replace the Cat Scan. Still, I can imagine a
doctor in the future saying something like, "You look to be in good shape,
but the dog's behavior suggests that we might want to run a few tests."

BTW, my last PSA just came back: 0.0. Yay!

It seems that various forms of cancer cause the body to emit different forms
of volatile organic compounds.  There are quite a few scientists studying
this area.  I am intimately involved in a biotech start-up that's focusing
on detecting these compounds without using a dog to sniff them out.  We're
hoping that if successful, it will change the face of medical diagnostics!!

Sandy K.