Dogs Trained To Sniff Out Ovarian Cancer

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Dogs have been trained to sniff out drugs, explosives, cadavers, mobile phones, firearms, and money but now AP reports that researchers have started training canines to sniff out the signature compound that indicates the presence of ovarian cancer. If the animals can isolate the chemical marker, scientists at the nearby Monell Chemical Senses Center will work to create an electronic sensor to identify the same odorant. "Because if the dogs can do it, then the question is, Can our analytical instrumentation do it? We think we can," says organic chemist George Preti. More than 20,000 Americans are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year. When it's caught early, women have a five-year survival rate of 90 percent. But because of its generic symptoms — weight gain, bloating or constipation — the disease is more often caught late."

Bad metric

[Grantbridge]

"When it's caught early, women have a five-year survival rate of 90 percent" - this is true for nearly all cancers even if there is no treatment. The fire-year survival rate depends MOSTLY on when you diagnose someone. And if you have a high false-positive in your diagnosis then you get a really big boost to the five-year survival rate. Screening programs boost the metric, but they don't necessarily boost actual survival, as the fire-year time starts from diagnosis.

Re:Genitals

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll probably bite them off. But if you would rather have them lick it, you could use peanut butter.

Re:Bad metric

[K. S. Kyosuke]

And if you have a high false-positive in your diagnosis then you get a really big boost to the five-year survival rate.

Hmm, are you sure that this is relevant? I would have thought that after getting a positive on a screening test, what you eventually do (perhaps after using one or more other screening methods) is a biopsy. As in, putting the stuff under the microscope being the reference diagnostic method for neoplastic tissue changes and all that jazz. I'd assume that when giving the five-year survival rate, you only consider patients with definitive diagnoses with false positives having been already excluded.

Re:Bad metric

[blackest_k]

10-year relative survival ranges from 84.1% in stage IA to 10.4% in stage IIIC
  Survival rates based on SEER incidence and NCHS mortality statistics, as cited by the National Cancer Institute in SEER Stat Fact Sheets â" Cancer of the Ovary http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/ovary.html [cancer.gov]

In Laymans terms if Ovarian Cancer is caught early then treatment such as Surgery and Chemotherapy have a reasonable chance of keeping women alive for 10 years or more, diagnose later and the chances are she will die. Screening really is about the only method of catching treatable cancers at an early enough stage that they can be treated since if you don't look for it , it tends to be already at an untreatable stage when it is eventually discovered.
Obviously screening doesnt make the untreatable , treatable but it does save lives where early treatment can make a difference. It's not pointless which is what you appear to imply.