As you know, I'm a sucker for my pets and will use almost any excuse to talk about my four-legged friends and yours in this space. It's even better when I have a good reason to talk about the many ways companion animals intervene for the good of our health too.

So, if you had any reason to question recent reports citing the ability of trained animals to sniff out cancer, this Japanese study, involving a black Labrador and colon cancer samples, should leave little wiggle-room for doubt.

For the record, a black lab named Marine was able to detect the presence of colon cancer in stool and exhaled breath samples taken from 40 cancer patients and more than 250 subjects who were completely healthy or were cancer survivors with nearly flawless accuracy. Moreover, she "whiffed" on only one of out of 38 stool samples (98 percent accuracy) and three out of 36 breath tests (92 percent).

Even more amazing, canine scent judgment detected the presence of colon cancer in its early stages with the same high degree of accuracy. By comparison, the typical fecal occult blood screening discovers the early stages of colon cancer about 10 percent of the time. And, the presence of smoking and other kinds of gut-related problems didn’t interfere with Marine's ability to sniff out colon cancer either.

However, the window in which dogs may accurately ferret out signs of cancer in odors is very short -- a maximum of 10 years -- which is why scientists hope to use what they've learned to build a sensor that can detect the organic compounds linked to cancer.

Until that day comes, if your Labrador starts barking at you some day for no apparent reason, I advise paying closer attention…

Gut January 31, 2011 Free Full Text Study

Yahoo News February 1, 2011

BBC News January 31, 2011

ScienceDaily January 31, 2011