Teaching dogs new tricks

doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7468.715

BMJ 2004;329:715 (25 September), doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7468.715

Commentary

Teaching dogs new tricks

T J Cole, professor of medical statistics¹

¹ Centre for Paediatric Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Institute of Child Health, London WC1N 1EH tim.cole@ich.ucl.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks"

Dorothy Parker

Dogs are widely recognised as smelling smells that humans miss.Yet the idea of turning this canine skill to clinical diagnosisis novel. The study by Willis et al takes a first cautious stepin testing such an idea by training dogs to detect bladder cancerfrom urine samples and then seeing if their detection rate whentested blind is better than expected by chance.¹

The design of the trial was simple and elegant. Six dogs weretrained to recognise urine samples from patients with bladdercancer compared with diseased and healthy sex matched controls.Each dog was then offered a set of seven urine samples, froma person with cancer and six controls, and they identified thesample they considered to be different by lying next to it.This process was repeated eight times, so each dog effectivelyrolled . . . [Full text of this article]

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Olfactory detection of human bladder cancer by dogs: proof of principle study: Carolyn M Willis, Susannah M Church, Claire M Guest, W Andrew Cook, Noel McCarthy, Anthea J Bransbury, Martin R T Church, and John C T Church
BMJ 2004 329: 712. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Rapid Responses:

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Teaching new dogs old tricks, smell the strep!: Friedrich Flachsbart
bmj.com, 27 Sep 2004 [Full text]
Thanks, Dr. Flachsbart. Excellent suggestion.: Dr. Herbert H. Nehrlich
bmj.com, 27 Sep 2004 [Full text]