The results of a study into whether cancer detection dogs can smell bladder cancer in other dogs’ urine suggests that this could be an effective new way to diagnose the disease in dogs.

Three dogs which had previously been trained to detect human bladder and prostate cancer, were trained by the charity, Medical Detection Dogs (MDD), to detect canine urothelial carcinoma (UC) of the bladder by the odour of urine.

The results show that canine bladder cancer has a distinct smell which specially trained dogs can rapidly and non-invasively detect with up to 90 per cent sensitivity (the rate at which the dogs correctly identified positive samples) and up to 95 per cent specificity (the rate at which the dogs correctly ignored negative samples).

Around one in four dogs will develop cancer during their lifetime and UC is the most common bladder cancer in dogs, accounting for almost 2 per cent of all reported canine cancers. 

Read the full University of Bristol news item

Paper: ‘Trained dogs can detect canine urothelial carcinoma of the bladder’ by I Desmas-Bazelle and N J Rooney et al. in Veterinary Oncology [open access]