Prostate cancer and dogs’ sense of smell: opportunities of noninvasive diagnostics

Introduction. A screening of prostate cancer is an important problem of healthcare system worldwide. Aim. To evaluate a possibility and efficiency of Belgian Malinois dogs’ sense of smell in diagnosis of prostate cancer. Materials and methods. Urine samples from 176 men were assessed. Of these, 112 samples were taken from patients with biopsy-proven prostate cancer, and 64 from healthy young men. The study with two Belgian Malinois dogs consisted of two stages. The first stage was to train the dogs to distinguish the urine of patients with prostate cancer. A total of 66 urine samples were used at this stage (from 42 patients with prostate cancer and 24 healthy people). At the second detection stage, urine samples of patients with prostate cancer was identified. A total of 110 urine samples were evaluated (70 patients with prostate cancer and 40 healthy people). Results. The first dog correctly identified 68 samples from patients with prostate cancer, and in 37 cases it indicated the absence of disease (sensitivity 97.1%, specificity 92.5%, accuracy 95.4%). The second animal correctly identified 69 and 39 samples, respectively (sensitivity 98.6%, specificity 97.5%, accuracy 98.2%). Conclusion. A possibility of training dogs to identify patients with prostate cancer has been demonstrated. Further studies dedicated to the detection of volatile organic compounds in the urine using specialized analyzers of “electronic nose” type, as well as gas chromatography in combination with mass spectrometry, are of both scientific and practical interest.

prostate cancer, volatile organic compounds, diagnostics, dogs, screening