Man's best friend sniffs out brain tumor
By Deborah L. Shelton / ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH / 04/12/2006

Steven Werner feeds his 11-year-old dog Wrigley a treat.
( AMANDA WHITLOCK /P-D)

Steve Werner suspected his health was in trouble even before his
golden retriever, Wrigley, started sniffing around.

His symptoms were vague back in June - occasional ringing in his
ears, a general feeling of unease. His doctor couldn't pinpoint a
problem. Tests came back negative.

Then in July, Wrigley started to behave strangely.

Every day when Werner would curl up next to his beloved canine at his
Brentwood home, she would turn, focus on his right ear and sniff
doggedly.

"I thought it was just a friendly sniff," Werner said. "But after
four or five days, I realized she seemed to be focusing on something.
At some point, I noticed she was always sniffing at the opening of my
right ear. She would set herself up and intently smell my ear."

One day, Werner was watching TV when a feature about cancer-sniffing
dogs grabbed his attention. What he heard propelled him back to his
doctor's office.

An MRI of Werner's head revealed a brain tumor the size of a pingpong
ball that had spread into the inner canal of Werner's right ear - the
very ear Wrigley had been sniffing persistently.

Werner, 40, had a rare nonmalignant tumor called acoustic schwannoma.
If not caught in time, it could have caused a stroke or permanent
facial paralysis.

He underwent surgery in Los Angeles in February to remove it and has
been recuperating at home.

Doggy diagnosis

Because of their keen sense of smell, canines have long been used to
sniff out guns, bombs, cadavers and illegal drugs, among other things.

Dogs also have been trained in medical settings to detect impending
epileptic seizures or identify tuberculosis in undiagnosed patients.

Now, researchers are studying the effectiveness of dogs in detecting
cancer.

"A couple preliminary studies suggest that a dog's nose is extremely
sensitive at detecting certain chemicals that make up the
constituents of a cancer cell," said Dr. Ted Gansler, director of
medical content in health information for the American Cancer
Society. "But it's hard to know how accurate untrained dogs are."

Research suggests that cancer cells emit chemicals not found in
healthy tissue. Certain types of solid tumors of the breast,
prostate, lung and bladder have been found to discharge volatile or
aerosolized compounds such as formaldehyde, benzene and alkanes.

Some researchers have successfully trained dogs to identify the
distinctive smells of the chemicals.

A study in the British Medical Journal in 2004 concluded that dogs
could be trained to detect bladder cancer on the basis of urine odor
alone.

Different breeds have been trained, depending on the study, including
poodles, beagles, cocker spaniels, Labrador retrievers, Portuguese
water dogs and mutts.

Nicholas Broffman, executive director of the Pine Street Foundation
in California, which published a study on cancer-detecting dogs last
month, found the Wrigley tale intriguing.

"That's a very common story," he said. "That's one of the reasons we
did this research, because we've heard all these stories and we
wanted to do a double-blind study to test the idea."

The foundation is a nonprofit, independent cancer research and
education organization. In its study published in a cancer journal,
researchers collected breath samples in plastic tubes from 83 healthy
volunteers, 55 lung cancer patients and 31 breast cancer patients.

The tubes were numbered and placed in plastic boxes and presented to
the dogs, five at a time. If the dog detected cancer, it was trained
to sit or lie down. Researchers determined that the dogs were
accurate 99 percent of the time in detecting lung cancer and 88
percent of the time in detecting breast cancer.

The breath samples were "blinded" so neither dog handlers nor
observers knew which samples were being tested until the study was
completed.

"We set out to see if cancer has a smell and if people with cancer
have a different smell than people without cancer," Broffman
said. "We were impressed with how well the dogs did."

Broffman said it's not clear whether dogs can detect both malignant
and benign tumors, such as the one Werner had.

"We're not sure exactly what the dogs are smelling, although we have
a hunch," Broffman said. "We want to do additional research to study
what the compounds are that they are responding to."

Some cancers, such as ovarian and pancreatic cancer, are usually not
caught until quite advanced, and "if there is a possibility of
detecting either one at stage one, this could be revolutionary," he
said.

'Many steps away'

Not everyone is wagging their tails about the dog studies.

The results of the lung and breast cancer study were too good to be
true, said Donald Berry, chairman of the department of applied
biostatistics and applied mathematics at the University of Texas-M.D.
Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

"It's essentially impossible that anything could be that good," he
said.

Berry also discounted the idea that cancers smell. "If they do, they
are bound to smell different," he said, because there are so many
different types.

Screening in actual clinical practice is more difficult than the
situation the dogs were encountering, said Gansler of the cancer
society.

In the published studies, dogs were taught to distinguish between
normal samples and samples taken from people with cancer. But samples
from people with a variety of other kinds of disease weren't
included, Gansler said.

"So we don't know very much about the potential for false positive
results from the dogs in which they are confusing, say, lung cancer
and pneumonia, or urinary infection and bladder cancer."

"This research is a good first step, but still many steps away from
actual clinical use," he said.

No one expects dogs to replace biopsies, X-rays or other cancer-
screening tools, but researchers are intrigued by the possibilities
in the olfactory abilities of man's best friend.

Dogs could possibly be used to help identify chemicals associated
with cancer, which would aid scientists in developing tests, possibly
a breathalyzer, to detect specific compounds.

Werner, meanwhile, is coping with temporary paralysis on the right
side of his face as he recovers. The surgery also caused complete
hearing loss in his right ear. He is grateful the tumor was caught
when it was.

"Don't get me wrong, I give credit to my doctor; she was the one who
found it," he said. "But there isn't any doubt in my mind that my dog
was looking out for me, that the unconditional love I gave her came
back."

Wrigley's life is much like it was before she morphed into Doctor Dog.

She spends much of her days watching the comings and goings on her
block. Friends and neighbors who organized meals for Werner during
his recuperation included special treats for the laid-back pet. She
turned 11 in July.

Werner, a commercial real estate developer, continues to lavish
affection on Wrigley - kissing and petting her, and calling her "my
girl."

And she hasn't sniffed his ear since he was diagnosed.

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