Dogs already have a well-deserved reputation for their excellent senses of smell. But their noses are actually so powerful that researchers have started to enlist dogs to help in detecting diseases.
To figure out how, we have to understand the way smell works. It turns out, researchers are still learning a lot about smell. In general, though, it's kind of like this: Receptors in our noses pick up chemicals in the air that our brains interpret as signifying a particular thing — e.g., roses, bananas, or NYC hot garbage. But dogs are able to interpret those signals with smaller amounts of the original chemical than humans require. That, combined with way more chemical receptors in their noses, leaves dogs with much more sensitive odor detection than humans.
Of course, some people do have more sensitive sniffers than others: For instance, researchers at the University of Edinburgh are currently working with Joy Milne, a 65-year-old woman who was able to smell her husband's Parkinson's. She described it as being a particularly odd "musky" stench.
Dogs are particularly interesting to doctors, though, because they can be trained to respond to those smells in certain ways, alerting their owners or medical staff that a patient is about to, say, hit dangerously low blood-sugar levels. So, here are three ways some very, very good doggies are helping out these days:
United States
- Switch To
- United Kingdom
- Germany
- France
- Australia
More from Trends
R29 Original Series
Advertisement