Dogs are born with one of nature’s best smelling tools and if new research plans are successful they could become doctors’ best friend when it comes to detecting prostate cancer. If the government will approve of the procedure, then dogs will be able to be used in hospitals as tests to detect prostate cancer at the earliest stages. They would sniff the urine of any suspicious patient and lie down if they smelled the scent that indicates the cancer. These tests would help because they would be less expensive and can detect the cancer before it’s too late.

Both dogs and humans smell using a membrane called the olfactory epithelium. Humans have about forty million receptors and dogs have about 2 billion receptors. Dogs can smell anywhere from one thousand to one hundred thousand times better than humans, depending on the scent.

It’s pretty easy to train the dogs once they know the scent. It takes 70 to 100 times of repeating an exercise over the course of two weeks. The researchers use an exercise to test the accuracy of the dog’s ability. They have the dogs sniff several urine samples of prostate cancer patients and non prostate cancer patients in a mixed order. The dogs are trained to lie down if the urine is from a prostate cancer patient and move on if not.

If the government sees that the dogs are accurate enough, they will be allowed to use the dogs for the tests. If the dogs can be used the tests would be much cheaper and be able to detect the cancer at earlier stages than ever before.