| OT, but related: 13 things that make no sense (article URL) [message #199502] |
Di, 10 Januar 2006 07:24 |
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http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524911.600
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| Re: OT, but related: 13 things that make no sense (article URL) [message #199513 ] |
Di, 10 Januar 2006 18:04 |
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ToolPackinMama wrote:
> http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524911.600
I also like scientific research that gives new life to old ideas. Such
as this one, for you dog lovers:
Dogs as good as screening for cancer detection
* 11:24 09 January 2006
* NewScientist.com news service
* Kurt Kleiner
Dogs do as well as state-of-the-art screening tests at sniffing out
people with lung or breast cancer. The research raises the possibility
that trained dogs could detect cancers even earlier and might some day
supplement or even replace mammograms and CT scans in the laboratory.
Two previous studies have shown that dogs seem to be able to sniff out
melanomas and bladder cancer. The idea is not outrageous. Cancer
patients have been shown to have traces of chemicals – like alkanes and
benzene derivatives – in their breath, and other studies have shown dogs
can detect chemicals in concentrations as small as a few parts per trillion.
So researchers at the Pine Street Foundation in San Anselmo, California,
US, selected three Labrador retrievers and two Portuguese water dogs
with no previous training, and over several weeks trained them using
breath samples that had been exhaled into tubes by cancer patients.
To test how well the dogs had learned, they used a new batch of samples
and had the dogs attempt to distinguish among 55 lung cancer patients,
31 breast cancer patients and 83 healthy controls. The patients had all
had their cancers confirmed by biopsy. The tests were double-blind, so
neither the dog handlers nor the experimenters knew which tubes were which.
General symptom
The dogs correctly detected 99% of the lung cancer samples, and made a
mistake with only 1% of the healthy controls. With breast cancer, they
correctly detected 88% of the positive samples, and made a mistake on
only 2% of the controls.
The work is convincing, says James C Walker, director of the Florida
State University Sensory Research Institute in Tallahassee, US. In 2004
Walker and colleagues showed that dogs could sniff out melanomas. He
says that the next step is to see if dogs are really detecting cancer,
or if they might be sensing a more general disease symptom, such as one
that comes from inflammation.
Walker says he would like, eventually, to see a long, large-scale trial
designed to test whether dogs can detect cancer even earlier than
standard screening tests.
Journal reference: Integrative Cancer Therapies (vol 5, p 1)
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8549
[
There used to be many anecdotes about such things that scientists used
to scoff at. Like one guy who took his dogs for a long walk outside his
house, until at one moment the dogs suddenly lay down on the ground and
refused to walk any further. He could still walk the dogs back in the
direction of the house, but they absolutely refused to continue walking
away from the house. Thinking that the dogs might be sick, the man
returned to his house. At that moment, he got a heart attack.
Fortunately he was able to use his phone to call for help. If he had
continued walking miles away from his home, away from any phone, that
heart attack might have killed him.
]
--
Steven D. Litvintchouk
Email: sdlitvin [at] earthlinkNOSPAM.net
Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.
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