Instant Genius - Medical Detection Dogs, Dr Claire Guest

Episode Date: October 16, 2022

Can animals sniff out cancer? Absolutely they can! It turns out that a dog’s incredible sense of smell can sniff out prostate cancer from a urine sample. Indeed, one recent study suggested that a dog can detect lung cancer from someone’s breath. So how do they do it? And how is this incredible talent being deployed in the real world? We talk to the co-founder of the Medical Detection Dogs charity Dr Claire Guest to find out. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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audio.com to learn more. From BBC, science focus, this is instant genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Daniel Bennett, magazine's editor. And for today's episode, I'm very happy to say we're talking about medical detection dogs. These are canine friends that can be used to sniff out disease. I'm joined by Dr. Claire Guest, the co-founder of the Medical Detection Dogs charity, which for the last decade and a half has been pioneering research, that has proven that a dog's incredible ability to pick up a sense,

can be used to detect diseases like cancer in samples of Europe. That research was first published a few years ago now, and today the dogs are deployed around the wilds in all sorts of ingenious ways. But before we get ahead of ourselves, here's Dr. Guest explaining what a medical detection dog can do. A medical detection dog is a dog that's been trained to find human disease by recognition of a specific odour that occurs, an odour change that occurs when we have a particular disease or condition. Now, this work comes from many anecdotes and actually many, many centuries ago, doctors use their nose, they use their sense of smell in order to help them diagnose particular

disease and conditions. You know, we have our own unique odors as individuals. But when we become unwell, this odor changes. And dogs with their incredible sense of smell can smell these differences, has been trained to find them and tell us about them. We've actually got sort of different ways in which our dogs work. So we have our biodeection dogs. And what these dogs do is they are trained to tell us whether or not a particular disease or condition changes the odour. But this dog only smells samples. So samples that have been a collection from people. So sweat samples or breath samples or urine samples and these will come to the dog at a training centre. The dog will then be trained to see whether it can discriminate this one particular disease from other diseases and from healthy people.

But we also have our medical assistance dog program and this is sort of the first tangible use of a medical detection dog. And this is where a dog works alongside an individual, you know, like a guide dog. would, keeping them safe. But instead of guiding by using the dog's eyes, what the dogs are doing are using their nose to indicate to the individual when an oncoming medical emergency might be about to occur. Now, what we're talking about is people who have got chronic conditions that have acute episodes which result in hospital admission. The dogs are trained to give a pre-warning to say, hey, you're about to become very unwell. You need to take your medication or you need to sit down. and this then results in the person being able to take a change of action,

which means that they hopefully don't end up in hospital. So what I'm talking about, traditionally, we trained a number of dogs for people who were type 1 diabetic, but people who had very, very big problems managing their blood sugars, a semical hyperglycemic unawareness, which basically means that people aren't aware when their blood sugars are going dangerously low. So for a non-diabetic, if we need to take on sugar, we tend to feel a bit dizzy and a bit weird. Yeah, exactly.

For people with type of diabetes, many people get no warning at all, and the first warning they all have is when they go unconscious. So the dog is actually trained to sniff blood sugar levels and can tell them when they're starting to drop to the low levels. Warn them, bring the blood testing kit, and the person is then able to correct their own blood sugar levels and prevent a medical emergency.

Amazing. So you have these kind of diagnostic dogs who sniff samples and will help you distinguish between a healthy patient and perhaps one that you need needs further medical attention. And then you have these kind of assistant type guide dogs who live with patients, I presume, and help them manage their... their condition. So I've got hundreds of questions. It's just completely fascinated to me.

So, I mean, the first off, you touched on it there. So this idea that we can smell illness is an old one. I wondered when did this, when did we first start using dogs specifically in this, in this way and how did it kind of come about that you that we realize that actually they've got incredible noses illness just give on smile here we go this is a great idea for the two together well absolutely i mean as you know as we said yes um the use of odors in the recognition of disease has gone back you know since the days of socrates i believe so we're talking a long you know a long history in there being an understanding that particular diseases do have characteristic odors. And of course, we've also been using dogs for many years to keep us safe

by sniffing drugs, explosives, etc. So, you know, the model of using a dog's nose, this incredibly powerful biosensor that the dog is naturally got is not a new one. And but when did it come together? Well, actually, strangely, very, very recently in terms of, you know, the history of man, in the 80s there started to be anecdotal reports that seemed to be saying the same thing and in fact I was privileged enough to work alongside an individual whose dog had kept on licking and sniffing

at a small mole on her calf. Now the lady, Jillian Lacey, was a young girl, she was in her late teens, but this dog persistently did it and to the point where it became irritating, you know, she said it just, his nose starts sniffing the air and then it would come along and find this mole

and keep on and on and on and on licking at it. Eventually went to her GP. GP looks at the mole and said there's anything, you know, nothing unusual here, but, you know, let's remove the mole. He did and she was called back to be told she had malignant melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer. Also, and somebody of her age would almost certainly have been, unfortunately fatal very quickly because it would have spread very rapidly. Now at the same time as Jill told me this story, there are other stories coming up around the world of people saying similar things that they thought their dog had warned them about cancers.

And these stories were picked up by Dr. John Church, who's my co-founder. And Dr. Church is an incredibly open-minded medic. He was actually a surgeon in Rwanda for many years. and he was in fact the only doctor, he said, for many years, people would walk miles to see him. And he said, I'd often use my nose. I didn't have a lot of, I didn't have a lot of sort of equipment in this hospital. He said, I'd use my nose to try and help me.

He heard of these anecdotes, and he actually wrote them in the letter to the Lancet Medical Journal, saying, you know, I've heard so many of these stories now, I think there's something we need to look into. I heard that he'd done this, actually by listening to, I was listening to Radio 4 interview. And, kind of long story short, we got together and found that we lived about 20 minutes from each other, decided then to do the first proof of principle study to find out whether

or not dogs could actually be trained to find the odor of cancer. It was a wonderful team. We worked with the Bucks NHS Trust and we actually started with bladder cancer. The reason being that, you know, if this, if this, was possible that, you know, dogs could smell cancer. Then we thought, well, let's start with urine and see if a tumour in the bladder drops any odour into the urine sample. And we discovered, yes, after a very short amount of training,

that dogs could rely, well, they could find bladder cancer. I mean, the early results were much lower than we were getting these days, but it was a very small sample set. And it was actually published in the British Medical Journal in September 2004. And from that point on really, certainly myself and Dr. Church were just absolutely committed to taking this as far as possible in order to assist in the saving of human lives. So there's a lot there. So in the instance of, say, the bladder cancer trials that you sort of first started with, there you're essentially asking the dogs to essentially identify. one cent, something with a certain cent to a sample without a sense?

Exactly that. Just able to tell difference. Yeah, exactly that. I mean, we now work with quantum physicists in the USA and I'll probably tell you a bit more about that. But what we realise and, you know, is that odour is complex, you know. It's made up of a number of things and the perception of the odour is very much. you know, how we, our senses, interpret it, the odour. So you can't look at a group of chemicals

and necessarily know what they're going to smell like. So it's a perceptual thing. But to give an example, if I, if I, I'm going to sing really badly now, and I do apologise beforehand. I don't sing, or hum. But if I say, da-da-da-da-da-da, you probably immediately recognise that.

Now, normally that is done by an orchestra, It's done by an orchestra with many, many instruments. And it's a very complex piece of music. But I've just done it really badly, but you knew what the pattern was. Now, if I'd given you the notes, if I'd written a note to you and said, right, these are notes, I'm going to show you these notes, what am I about to sing? You haven't any idea at all. And that would seem to be the complication with odour.

That if you put something into a mass spectrometer, a gas chromatographer, it will give you the ingredients, as in it will give you the notes, but it won't tell you what it sounds like, what it smells like, exactly. And the dog is actually a complex pattern recogniser. So what he's able to do is recognise that pattern. So if he sees that little bar of music, that odour in a sample, he says, yeah, that's it. And that's even if it's played by a violin, hummed by me, or played on a recorder, dog will still recognize the pattern. And that's where the science of the dog's capability

in olfaction and actually technology in the future, that's why it's such an important synergy, because only the dog actually knows what cancer smells like at this moment. So I'm going to quiz you about those quantum physicists in a short while. But just first So just to go back to those anecdotes of some of the early, you know, there was the one that you talked about with the melanoma. I'd read about other dogs sort of pestering their owners when they could sense something wrong. Do we know whether the dogs were able to understand that they were smelling something sort of like a foreign body or kind of not something of you, I suppose? They may not have known, understand what country is. No, exactly. It's a very interesting question.

I think the one thing about a dog is a dog is the dog, dogs are neophilic, which basically means that dogs are interested in new things. And that's actually how we're able to train them to new things, because as soon as they've got something new, they're interested. That's how dogs are programmed. So it's a good question. Is it something new, something different, that they are just, just, just, just, just investigating, or have they got a sense as well that it's something that could be harmful?

Now, it's quite difficult to know because the domestic dog has learnt to communicate incredibly well with humans. And of course, one of the roles of a domestic dog, regardless of the type of dog and the way it lives, they want to keep a safe. That is sort of hardwired into our relationship. So the question is, yes, is it simply a, that's new, that's interesting, or is there an element of it's new and interesting and actually concerning? Now, of course, the dog doesn't know it's cancer, but he may well have at some level and understanding that if it was something that appeared in his dog pack, that it was possibly a threat, that the odour was a threatening type of odour. So I suspect it's a combination of the two, although, of course it would be quite hard to prove that. So that makes me nicely then too. How do you sort of select for a medical detection dog?

Can any dog sort of be trained in this manner? Or are there certain types of dog that, you know, obviously the obvious one that comes to mind is something like a bloodhound because of how famous they are in fiction and even in the world for their sense of smell? But how do you pick a future dog? So when you look at the anecdotal stories, the dogs that were warning people one on one

and also the dogs that we place as assistance dogs, you're looking for a dog, yes, with a good nose, you know. So we use a lot of gun dogs and dogs that have got, you know, so longer noses and inches and sniffing. But actually in that particular type of detection, the relationship is really important, which is where we go back to what we just talked about, does the dog see it as some sort of threat.

It's that relationship the dog has with the human that seems to make them particularly keyed in, to a change in odour. So we tend to, for that role, pick dogs that bond very closely with their owner. For the biode detection dogs, the dogs that are looking for different changes in odour on samples, we use a different type of temperament.

Actually, in that situation, you want sort of these high drive spaniels, high drive dogs that love being busy, love rushing around, finding, looking, finding, looking. The sort of dogs that actually might be quite tricky as pets because they're constantly on the go, constantly wanting to find. Those dogs have to be quite independent because actually when we train them,

once we've gone through the early training stages, we don't actually know what's in the sample. So we need the dog to say, you know, I'm brave enough to make this decision myself and I'm going to tell you it's here. So they tend to be quite busy, independent characters. So actually, you know, there's quite a variety of breeds we use. Yes, of course, the fact that pet dogs, it was the anecdotes from pet dogs that enabled us to know that this was

possible. In theory, and actually in practice around the world still, there are still reports of people saying, you know, my dog's just done something really strange and it made me, you know, take notice of something and actually I went on to find I got a tumour or an illness. So yes, of course, it is still happening. But for the work that we do, we would normally use dogs that are pre-trained. So we'll be selecting dogs with particular temperance. And what's the kind of, what's the kind of scope of this then? We've talked about a couple of conditions they can detect. Another quite famous one that was recently in the noodles was in COVID detection. You can see how that would immediately be useful at things like airports and places like that. What else can they sniff out?

Okay, slip. No, no, that's absolutely. So what we've seen so far is that there doesn't seem to be any end to the ability of dogs to detect disease. So what you're really looking at is, you know, what diseases should we be focusing on in order to, you know, assist in protecting human health? And actually what does these is to the dogs find most straightforward in terms of detection? So, you know, we know for our assistance dogs that the dogs can detect, as to say, blood sugar changes. We also now know they can detect Addison's crisis, so they can detect changes in our cortisol levels and cortisol adrenaline levels. And we also know that dogs are incredibly reliable at detecting a condition called POTS. Now, pots is relatively newly recognized.

It's a condition where it's often young people actually develop a condition where they suddenly collapse. It's not an arcoleptic collapse, so they're not going to sleep and they don't have seizures. But what happens is they literally dropped the floor. I mean, if you ever stood beside somebody who has pots, I mean, it isn't graceful. It's an instant. It's caused by sudden rapid heart rate and a sudden, a drop in blood pressure. Currently, there's no way of knowing

when you're about to have an attack and some individuals will have them 10, 15 times a day. These individuals have to, and sadly become, use wheelchairs because because the drop is so instant, they fall on people on things, they break things, they break bones, they damage their faces, you know.

So we've discovered that dogs can reliably detect a pulse attack about three to five minutes before it happens. And so we have a huge demand for our potter detection dogs. Moving to the sort of biodelection dogs, what we've always believed in terms of cancer and other diseases such as cancer, where you've got complex pathways, you know, it isn't just about knowing whether you have cancer,

it's how bad is it, how advanced it? is, where is it, has it spread, all these things. We never believe that the dog would be actually used as the diagnostic. Our vision, as a charity, was always that we need to learn from the dog. You know, if a dog can smell the odour of prostate cancer and a urine sample, then ultimately machine can. And when you look at how difficult the accurate detection of prostate cancer is, PSA currently up to 75% false positive.

I mean, that's massive. People tend to think, you know, because you're looking at a medical test, it's got to be, you know, it's going to be 100% isn't it? And then you find actually no, it's nowhere near. But it's the best we've got, so we use it. The dog has this ability to detect prostate cancer from a drop of urine. We have had results well into the 80%, and what we're looking to do with that is we are looking to translate this.

Now, of course, we haven't got the expertise here to know how to translate what the dogs nose knows, if you like, into an nutritional device, but we have teamed up with people that do. So we've teamed up with a quantum physicist called Andreas Mersian, who works out of MIT. and Andreas has developed a sort of a nose, an electronic nose, which works in a very similar way to a dog's nose. Don't ask me too much detail because I don't. But the actual senses in it are as accurate as a dog's nose.

But what the nose is missing is the brain that makes interpretation. So we're working with Andreas and now artificial intelligence designers, and I have to say the best in the world. But guess who is informing the artificial intelligence what the smell is? One of your dogs, yeah. Exactly, because we don't know what the smell is. So what the dog can do is smell a whole range of samples and say, this sample here.

Now this is really, this is exactly what cancer smells like to me. This is a really good example of it. So that gives that artificial technology to data set. You can give the dog another sample sometimes, which may well have come from somebody with cancer. But the dog says, you know what? That's a tough one. You know, a smell's faint there.

And these data points go into the artificial intelligence and the artificial intelligence starts to learn what the smell is. So you train the dogs. And the dog trains. AI. Exactly that. AI goes on to sort of. Yeah, exactly that.

So in terms of things like cancer and other, once we've, you know, we've been working on prostate cancer with the teams for four or five years, but the teams are very hopeful they'll have something, you know, for clinical trial before, before too long. In terms of cancer,

it's about translating the dog's ability into something else. In terms of the assistance dogs, it's very much helping those. individuals who have no other alternatives at the moment. So for example, in diabetes, actually, though we started in diabetes 14 years ago, we now find that the technology has improved so much. The people are now wear Libra devices that they scan with their phones and have a continuous glucose monitor system.

So we're finding the need for a dog in glucose monitoring is decreasing. But you mentioned COVID, so that's our sort of new interest and work, is that could a dog work in an environment where the dog, one dog screens hundreds or thousands of people? So instead of the one dog to one person model or the dog going to an electronic device, could there be situations where a dog would be of huge value sniffing numerous people and looking for the same disease? The COVID model taught us that that is possible. COVID itself wasn't straightforward for so many reasons we could do another podcast on it. but it's to do with the changing, the variant changes,

the government changed in terms of policy and the way in which we test for, you know, is somebody testing on an LFT or on a PCR and either various things make actual COVID itself quite a tricky landscape. But we are now looking very much at the dog's ability to detect, say, bacteria in groups. And we're actually looking at vulnerable groups.

So groups, for example, where they may be very prone to urinary tract infections, which can result in delirium and a fall, before anybody really knows that a UTIs started. So all the work we did in COVID, and we still have COVID dogs, and they are still being used, but they're not being used,

and perhaps the settings we originally anticipated they might. But the information knowledge we've gained from that work is now being translated into other projects. So incredibly exciting to see that, you know, one dog could actually, you know, one dog could sniff 300 people and half an hour without any problem. So talking, you know, quite big numbers. So just there, I just want to go back to the example of the medical assistance dogs and pots. Just to give our list of a sort of a real sense of how the dog is doing it. So in that circumstance, or maybe there's an easier, another easier example,

is it changes in our sweat that the dog is able to smell? And is it, is the dog just suddenly smelling the presence of a chemical? Or is it the kind of, you know, an increase over time of this chemical? And then, you know, how does that whole process work? We don't know for absolutely sure, you know, what it is that the dogs look for when they notice this change. clearly, yes, when a major event is occurring

and we're becoming, you know, a heart rate racing and our blood pressure is dropping, the body is going into a sort of shock mechanism and there are, of course, a lot of hormones, internal hormones, endocrines, things that are changing at that point. We may even be, without knowing it,

starting to hyperventilate, so our oxygen, carbon dioxide ratios, may be changing. There's a whole range of things at that sudden acute episode, There'll be odour changes in this. They're coming out of our skin and coming out of our breath. Now, quite what the dog uses

or whether the dog uses is a combination of things, we don't yet know. But what we do know is that, you know, three to five minutes before a pot's drop attack, nobody, no human with any technology currently, can say to that person, be careful, you're about to just, in three minutes you're going to fall flat on your face.

So whatever it is, that obvious if you should be. But the dog, absolutely. So what the dogs are trained to do is monitor the odour of the client they're with. So, you know, just through, not through sort of anything obvious, actually. But these are dogs that are beside the person, you know, being stroked by the person. I just sat with them. And then suddenly you just see, you see their noses start to twitch.

And then what we train the dog to do is. So the dog himself is, is, understands that that odours, the odour I'm interested in. What we have to do as well is say to the dog, okay, when you smell that odor, this is how you communicate it to your owner that you smelt it. Yes. So you either, you know, some of our dogs pour, some of the dogs stare intently. Many of the pots dogs stop. So say you're walking on the street, the dog would just stop and stare. and the person knows I'm going to fall any minute.

So it's about the dog detecting, but then communicating. Because, of course, probably a lot of pet dogs detect it in terms of the dog is aware that somebody's happened before. He's not able to do is communicate back. It's going to happen. So it's a combination of the two things. So this strikes me as, you know, so I cover a lot of research where we're learning more and more

about how dogs communicate. with us on a visual level. They're really good at understanding our gaze, where we're looking at what we're pointing at. Absolutely. Is there probably a whole overlooked sort of communication pathway in smells in the way that they understand us? Absolutely. And do you know what?

It's very interesting because you're quite right. Research now has come a long way in understanding how a domestic dog, you know, when a puppy's born, is already clued into our. looking at how he visually, facially look, you know, finger pointing. They are very sophisticated in reading humans visually. Actually, for medical detection dogs, that can be a disadvantage. If we get a dog that is very good at watching somebody visually, we quite often find that they try and do it visually without using their nose. And actually, that doesn't work. So what we we, what we do is when we get our young dogs, we're encouraging that use of nose right from the

start, you know, I want you to use your nose, hey, find this, look for that. You know, isn't that a great, great game? Of course, which they, of course they do because they have these phenomenal noses. But yes, we have to be careful, actually, not to let visual, you know, the dog communicating was visually override that. Otherwise, we do find that the dogs never really alerting correctly. I mean, it's a really interesting thing. I mean, you know, we use the dogs eyes and domestically, clearly living with us, dogs have become incredibly good at reading our emotions visually. But of course, olfaction, I mean, they have 350 million sensory receptors in their olfactory epithelium. That's the sort of average dog with a sort of medium-sized nose.

They have a much larger part of the brain that is dedicated to olfaction. And they also have this organ of Jacobson, which is at the back of the throat, which is a pheromonal screen as well. So in fact, what the dogs do is as they sniff an odour, they do it in a way that we look, we see something. So they're getting odour information from the right and left nostril. And that's coming into the epithelium. So they're also making a comparison, which is how we believe we see, you know, right and left eye gives you a, you then get this match, don't you, to see exactly what's in front of you.

At the same time, a dog will gulp air back into the back of his throat, and he'll push air up into the organ of Jacobson. So at the same time the air is being sensed in the epithelium, it's being analysed in the organ of Jacobson. And that goes to a slightly different part of the brain. That's looking at much longer molecule chains. So in fact, in an instant, there's so much much going on, And in fact, what the dog does when it's just that rapid sniff, and many dog owners know when their dog's interested, because the dog changes from a normal breathing sniff to a really rapid. Yeah, I'm interesting.

And what they're doing then is they actually are like little pumps. They're spiring out little air that whirls the molecules round and pulls molecules up much more rapidly. So they become like little odour hovers. and the other thing which is of huge interest is and you ask why do dogs have slits at the side of their noses? We don't. Why do they? That's because they can exhale air they've used

at the same time as inhaling new air. I see right. Yeah. It's not to be tried at home by humans. We make lots of funny snorty noises. Yeah, I know. Familiar that. My partner's most of the noise at night.

That's kind of a snorty noise at night. So, you know, so they can push it out. it's the same time as they're putting it in. I mean, they are adapted to olfaction. It's incredible. But through their history with man, we've almost, apart from the instances with drugs and explosives dogs, for example, we've almost tried to reduce that.

You know, puppies are very used to being taught. Don't sniff that. Don't sniff that person. It's rude. Don't sniff them there. It's really rude. Constant where the dog is trying to gain olfactory information. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's something that has been very poorly used.

And, you know, in terms of the way that dogs have adapted to living with us, I think their visual ability to read us has improved. So looking ahead then lastly, with everything that you've just said, you know, obviously we don't want teams of dogs in labs having to spend all their days sniffing out. this cancer or that cancer, which is why they, you know, making a machine version makes so much sense, but for other reasons as well. But do we anticipate we can actually replicate what they do so well, given, you know, all of the skills that they have? Does that seem like a challenge that we can kind of achieve? Yeah, I mean, I think the teams we work with are sure,

that in time, of course, it's time is, you know, researches can be, can be difficult to judge, but there will be sensors that reliably do what the dogs are currently able to do. Now, it's interesting because Andreas Merchant, the quantum physicist was a Captain Kirk fan. And so was I, I was brought up on Star Trek. So apologies to those that don't remember William Shatner as Captain Kirk, but I was going to marry William Shatner. There was just one problem with it. He wasn't aware of that. But they used to walk around on the Starship Enterprise in those days.

And they used to have these little walkie-talkie things that flip up phones. And they used to speak to each other. And this was so well before we had mobile phones. And it was like, oh, what, that could happen. And then they'd even have things where people's faces would be on screens. and the person would be talking on the screen. I mean, this is well before it's time. I mean, now we've all got that.

You know, we've all got a phone that's got a screen. How actually in Star Trek, they also had the doctor who was called Bones. He used to scan people with this little scanner, volatile scanner, to see what was wrong with them. We've gone to come so far in technology. And, you know, what Andrea says is if you think of the rudimentary mobile phone, it was a bit of a surprise that you could even you could even use it as a phone before because everything else had been attached to a wall

suddenly now suddenly somebody says okay the phone's good what can we do next okay let's put a camera on it the first cameras were poor they were grainy they weren't very good now the cameras on our phones as good as most cameras most digital cameras

he believed strongly that the next thing will be a nose there were already some early prototypes, very rudimentary. They only tend to pick out gases in the rooms or, you know, very basic, but, you know, it's starting. And it's a really interesting question, actually, because the same way in which we try and protect our photograph, our facial, you know, sorry, the way we try and protect, you know, photographs of ourselves and they belong to us and it's our right, whether from our privacy.

Our privacy, sorry, that's right. It's a good question, whether, there's going to be odour privacy because actually you could look to a time when I can take some odour off here. I can find out if you've got Parkinson's, if you've got high blood sugar, if you've been drinking, if you've been taking drugs, a whole lot. I could do one hit if I've got a decent sensor. So, you know, will we start to try and protect our odor? I mean, you know, this is something that is, you know, already been talked about. So it's clearly we're on our way. How good those things will be, I think that will depend on two things, how straightforward the odour is. Some odors are more straightforward than others. And also how

much we can use our dogs to help advance the understanding of the differences between odors, because it can be a bit needle in the haystack unless you've got something to guide you. But yes, is it going to happen? Yes, it's going to happen. It will happen. Will it mean the dogs have got no work, not in my life, I don't think. I think, you know, there are always going to be situations where the dog could be better, more adaptable, where the dog may offer other things

in terms of, for example, if you did have an electronic device that tells you that you are going to have a potts attack, these pots attacks occur at any time, any place. The individuals are, if they know they're about to have one, they have to lie down, this is going to happen in the supermarket, for example.

You suddenly think, I'm going to drop. If I can't find a chair, I have to lie down somewhere. Now the dog sit beside these people. I'm not sure an extraent advice would be quite so. Quite so, I suppose you could have a computer waddling along with you. But you know what I mean? You know, the dog offers other things as well. So, and I think with the constantly changing diseases

and constantly changing threats, the way in which nature constantly adapts itself. So the COVID virus has adapted itself already about 34 times. We're constantly going to need something in nature to help us, and that's going to be the dog. Because, yeah, I think, you know, so there's still a lot of work to be done. So lastly, then, I just want to add that you're a charitable organisation, is that right?

So if anyone wants to find out more, get involved, help out or donate, where should they go? What should they do? Absolutely. Go on to our website, www.medicaldetectiondogs.org.com. And please do get involved. I mean, we're only here because of the support and belief of the public. You know, there was a huge amount of skepticism to start with. I can't tell you how much skepticism there was. my story, my personal story is that after I trained the first cancer dogs for the 2004 publication, I had a personally very difficult time in life and my marriage broke up and I was left with my dogs.

And Daisy was a dog that I'd had since a pup. She was working on prostate cancer on samples. She was a really good dog. But she started to become a bit sort of anxious around me. And I'd take her home and she'd sit with me. And I could see this sort of, she looked slightly upset. I couldn't work out why. And then, in fact, other people working with me commented on it.

One day I opened the back of the car up, etc. out for a walk, lift the boot up. She wouldn't jump out. She kept just nudging, staring at me and nudging at me in my chest. So, you know, I thought it was a bit weird, you know. anyway, Daisy, I then let her go and she went off and had a run round. And as I was walking around, I was sort of feeling where she'd been bumping into me. I found a very, very small lump.

And I was not worried, but, you know, in the end, I thought, well, I'll go and get it checked out. And I was, went to a specialist and was referred to a specialist. My doctor was concerned. And long story short, I was diagnosed with a very deep-seated breast cancer. I had surgery, hormone treatment, lymph node removal, radiotherapy, etc., etc., etc. I'm here 10 years later to tell the tale. And my consultant, too, my oncologist consultant and my breast consultant both said that had Daisy not draw my attention to it, my prognosis would have been very different because it was extremely deep-seated.

And probably by the time it had grown, I would have probably been seriously unwell. I wrote a book about sort of the starting of the charity and how Daisy had helped me in that sport and how her legacy lives on. And, you know, it's still something where there still can be scepticism. And I think the scepticism is often that people don't take. the time to understand actually what we want to do, you know, how we believe the dogs are helping us. And the more we can get that message out, the more support we can get, the more lives we can save. When my dad was diagnosed with Parkinson's about six years ago, nobody at the moment

is diagnosed with Parkinson's until the symptoms are so severe that the damage has been done effectively. So, and there's no going back. My dad helped me set up charities that he was a volunteer. He worked tirelessly to take the charity forward. And yet he died of a disease where there's currently no early diagnostic. He died three months ago. And, you know, I sort of promised him that, you know, we would keep working on this because dogs can smell Parkinson's without any doubt.

It's not, it's actually not one of the hardest odors. It seems to have quite a unique odor that they've made. recognise well. Dogs can find it earlier, treatments can improve. It's a terrible debilitating disease. So it's about working with medics and working with research to improve health and the prognosis for individuals. And that's really what we believe is a charity. So any minute does hear this wants to support us, please, please do, because we're making a massive difference, you know, to the understanding of the way in which you can save human lives in the future. That was Dr. Claire guest there, the co-founder of the Medical Detection Dogs charity,

explaining how her dog saved her life. If you want to get involved or find out more about these dogs, do head to Medical Detection Dogs.org.org.com. Thank you for listening. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC. Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in the supermarket and newsagents, as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, do on find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music

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