In a recent study performed by French medical researchers, dogs were trained successfully to detect cancer in urine.

The dogs underwent several months of training in three phases.  The goal of the training was to see if dogs were able to correctly identify the volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, which are present in the urine of people diagnosed with various types of cancer, including prostate cancer.

The first phase of the cancer detection training, which lasted five months, dogs were taught to identify cancer urine.  These were samples of urine collected from people undergoing cancer treatments.  During the second phase of training, which lasted eleven months, dogs were trained to identify urine contaminated with prostate cancer cells and control urine samples, which had no traces of cancer.  In the third and final phase of the dog training, the dogs were given several samples of urine, in which one was cancer urine and the remaining samples were cancer-free control samples.  The researches wanted to see if the trained dogs could correctly select the cancer urine out of the samples presented to them.

The dogs were able to correctly detect 63 out of 66 urine samples, with only  three false-positive results.

This research is important to urologists and men suspected of having prostate cancer.  The current methods to detect prostate cancer in men, namely the prostate specific antigen test, or PSA and the prostate biopsy, have a high false positive rate, and some biopsies come back clear when the patient in fact does have prostate cancer.

While urine-sniffing dogs will not replace the PSA as the standard for prostate cancer detection at the moment, the results will allow researchers and the medical diagnostics industry to begin developing new types of prostate cancer treatments and testing  procedures that detect VOC’s, which is likely to be a more reliable predictor of prostate cancer.  Dogs have successfully identified VOCs in patients with other forms of cancer as well, so the research for a new class of reliable tests to detect early stage prostate cancer is promising.

Any new testing methods will require more testing and ultimately, FDA approval before new more reliable tests and treatment programs can be developed and offered to prostate cancer patients and those suspected of having prostate cancer .