Morgan BellSniffing out disease
June 20th 2006 13:07
“Physicians have always used their own senses to determine the presence or absence of disease,” Dr Larry Myers, associate professor at the Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine in Auburn, USA, told MSNBC. Dogs simply have a more sophisticated sense of smell that may allow them to detect the subtle odours of illnesses like diabetes and even cancer.
A report was published in March this year about a study that tested if dogs can detect cancers by merely sniffing the breath of test subjects. The study was led by Michael McCulloch of the Pine Street Foundation in San Anselmo, California, and Tadeusz Jezierski of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Genetics and Animal Breeding. Researchers concluded that dogs could in fact detect breast and lung cancer with sensitivity and specificity between 88% and 97%, and could even detect the early stages of lung and breast cancer.
In an attempt to improve on this smelly method of detection, the European Union Information Society's Technologies Program recently announced a new technology that will allow diseases to be detected with electronic “noses”.
The device has been modelled on the olfactory receptors (odour recognition systems) of humans and animals. ABC Science reports that “the gadget consists of a layer of proteins placed on a gold microelectrode and mounted on a two-millimetre-long computer chip. One end of the chip is immersed in a liquid cell containing additional microelectrodes, all of which connect to an instrument that measures electrochemical changes.”
Researchers are currently mapping odours to their resulting spectrums.
Additional random little bit of trivia: did you know that sperm have a sense of smell too?
(image from flickr.com)
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