British dogs trained to sniff out diabetes danger

AYLESBURY, England: Dogs are being qualified in Britain as possible life-savers to warn diabetic owners when their blood sugar levels fall to treacherously low levels.Man's best friend previously has been shown competent of sniff out certain cancer cells, and dogs have long been put to work in the hunt for prohibited drugs and explosives.Their new front-line role in diabetes care follows current evidence signifying a dog's oversensitive nose can notice tiny changes that occur when a person is about to have a hypoglycemic attack.A investigation last December by researchers at Queen's University Belfast found 65 percent of 212 people with insulin-dependent diabetes reported that when they had a hypoglycemic incident their pets had react by whining, barking, licking or some other display.At the Cancer and Bio-Detection Dogs research centre in Aylesbury, southern England, and animal trainer are put that finding into practice and honing dogs' innate skills.The charity has 17 save dogs at a variety of stages of preparation that will be paired up with diabetic owners, many of them children."Dogs have been trained to detect certain odours down to parts per trillion, so we are talking tiny, minute amounts. Their world is actually very dissimilar to ours," Chief Executive Claire Guest told Reuters TV.The centre was started five years ago by orthopaedic surgeon Dr John Hunt, who wanted to investigate curious anecdotes about dogs harassment their owners repeatedly on parts of their body that were later establish to be cancerous.At approximately the same time, the first hard proof was being gather by researchers down the road at Amersham Hospital that dogs could recognize bladder cancer from chemicals in urine.The move into diabetes followed the case of Paul Jackson, who told Guest and her team about his dog Tinker who warns him when his sugar levels get too low and he is in danger of collapsing."It's usually licking my face, panting beside me. It depends how far I have gone before he realises," Jackson said.Tinker has now been educated by the Aylesbury centre and is a fully capable Diabetic Hypo-Alert dog, complete with red jacket to announce himself as a working assistance animal.The centre is continuing work to perfect dogs' ability in spotting signs of cancer. But while dog-lover Guest says it would be nice to have a dog in every doctor's office to screen for disease, ultimately that is not practical.Instead, she hopes the research will lead to the invention of an electronic nose that will mimic a dog's."At the moment electronic noses are not as advanced as the dogs', they are about 15 years behind. But the work that we are doing and what we are finding out will help scientists advance quickly so that they can use electronic noses to do the same thing," she said

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