The widely used prostate specific antigen (PSA) tests that doctors use to help detect cancer risk in men could be a thing of the past. The test can lead to missed aggressive prostate cancer in men who have it. It can also indicate that a cancer is aggressive when it in fact, isn’t.
Alternative testing forms are being developed. One that was featured recently in Science Daily used dogs, trained to detect prostate cancer from urinary samples. The results were highly accurate. In a pilot study, researchers trained two dogs to detect aggressive prostate cancer in urine samples. The dogs detected aggressive forms of cancer in 71 percent of test subjects. They were also able to identify negative cases with between 70 and 76 percent accuracy levels.
Obviously, using dogs to detect prostate cancer is not logistically possible at a wide level. However, this research is exciting because of the potential and possibilities it opens. “The findings suggest that larger studies could further integrate these disparate methodologies in order to improve detection of advanced prostate cancer and aid development of new diagnostic tools that replicate dogs’ olfactory capabilities,” states the article, “Learning from prostate cancer-detecting dogs to improve diagnostic tests.”
