Diseases & Conditions
Man's best friend — and medicine's too?
Dogs may one day help identify certain health conditions early.
For as long as dogs have been domesticated, humans have relied on them for companionship and their remarkable sense of smell. Dogs and their super sniffers help humans hunt; track criminals; and detect guns, drugs, or explosives in airports. Now scientists are investigating whether dogs can also help sniff out diseases before humans know they have them.
Scents and scent-ability
A dog’s keen sense of smell outranks ours many times over. For example, dogs’ brains devote more real estate to analyzing scents than ours, their noses have 60 times the number of scent receptors as ours (about 300 million versus our five million), and their smell accuracy is far more precise than ours. "Dogs have exquisitely sensitive noses and can detect molecules in the parts-per-trillion range. Humans, in contrast, typically detect odors in the parts-per-million range," says Dr. Sophia Koo, an infectious disease specialist at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
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