A couple years ago, my grandpa got diagnosed with throat and lung cancer. My mom's dog has never been one to choose favorites but as soon as my grandpa would walk through the door, Murphy would stick to him like glue. He'd sit down to watch the Eagles game and Murphy would curl up on his lap and stay there the entire time. He's not typically like that with anyone. Normally he jumps around from person to person or even chooses to lie by himself on the floor. My mom has a medical background and she had heard that dogs can sense cancer and I wondered if that was true and why it is.
Dogs have been living among humans for thousands of years while we provided food and shelter and dogs have grown, in turn, to protect us. This article explains that if something is wrong with humans, it will affect the dog as well and they'll notice. A dog has a lot keener sense of smell than we do and they can be trained to sniff out anything from gun powder to drugs. Oncologists believe that humans can smell cancer in the latter stages of their disease so it's no surprise that dogs would be able to smell it before we can.
Another article I found describes a study that was conducted where five dogs were trained throughout three weeks to be able to detect breast and lung cancer based on breathe. They had 86 cancer patients who had yet to go through treatments mixed with 83 healthy volunteers. Every person gave breathe samples that were given to the dogs in tubes. The dogs would then sit or lay down in front of the samples in which they smelled cancerous scents and researchers discovered that the dogs were able to correctly spot cancer in both the early and late stages.
If the fact that dogs can smell cancer isn't interesting enough for you, you can check out this article that talks about how they can smell low blood sugar in diabetics as well. http://www.nhs.uk/news/2013/08August/Pages/Dogs-warn-diabetics-after-smelling-low-blood-sugar.aspx
This blog was so interesting!! I've seen so many articles on things like Yahoo! News about stories of dogs saving lives! It's really crazy how smart dogs are. Not many people realize it, but dogs are extremely intelligent. They can detect all sorts of emotion from humans as well as pick up signs from our physical bodies. Dogs can tell when people are stressed or frightened about something, so if there is a situation that arises in which their owner is put into danger, dogs are very capable of reacting. In a lot of cases, they can save lives! Like you said in your blog post, dogs are very helpful for so many reasons, like smelling cancer! How cool is that!? Here is an article about a lot of different situations in which dogs have saves lives! http://www.hlntv.com/slideshow/2013/09/30/hero-dogs-guide-dog-good-deed-pet-saved-child
This was really interesting to me. I always heard about dogs knowing emotions and that kind of thing but never really about being able to sense cancer! It's crazy how they can be so aware of things that humans don't know yet. I was going to look into dogs knowing emotions, but instead I stumbled upon articles about dogs being able to sense pregnancy. According to the articles, there hasn't been scientific research done yet, but dogs seem to know when changes are happening in the body so it would make sense that they could tell when this major change occurs. It would be great for more research to be done on this and find out if it's really true! It's nuts that dogs can know things about us we don't even know about ourselves yet.
http://animal.discovery.com/pets/do-dogs-know-when-i-am-pregnant.htm
http://www.babycenter.com/404_can-pets-sense-pregnancy_1379572.bc