Dogs are amazing, or at least this author thinks so. Apart from being adorable and loyal, they have incredible abilities — their sense of smell being one of them. A dog’s nose has 300 million olfactory receptors and the brain is highly developed to process these smells. With this highly evolved and specialized olfactory system, dogs can track by smelling, smell certain types of cancer, and even sniff out diabetes.
Lives have been saved by medical detection dogs, and for the first time, scientists think that they have figured out how dogs are able to smell the disease. Medical detection alter of wake up their owners when sugar level drops and reaches hypoglycaemia.
Reseachers from the University of Cambridge in the UK, studied the breaths of eight women using a technique called mass spectrometry, which is able to detect chemical compounds in very low concentrations. The blood glucose levels of the women were lowered (in a controlled environment) to the point of hyplocaemia and the changes in the chemical composition of exhalations were studied. Their researched show a increase of isoprene.
While the change in isoprene is too subtle for a human nose to detect dogs — with their specialized noses — are able to smell it.
Dogs are able to smell odors at concentrations of one part per trillion. That’s like a human being able to detect one teaspoon of sugar in two Olympic sized swimming pools. It’s no wonder they can detect a change in isoprene.
There’s still work to be done to know why the body produces isoprene when sugar levels drop (believed to be a by product of cholesterol), and the results need to be confirmed. In the meantime, we should try to teach an old dog new tricks — literally.
