As many of you know today is Metastatic Breast Cancer Awareness Day. You can read our most here about ten things you need to know about Metastatic Breast Cancer.

And as many of you may also know we have been covering the whole issue of service dogs as part of therapy during the process of deciding to get a dog for our autistic son.

So you can imagine my fascination and delight when I read a blog post yesterday in the UK’s Daily Telegraph by Judith Potts called “Medical detection dogs have the go-ahead for the first European Breast Cancer Detection Trial”.

Ms Potts shares “One small charity has just received the go-ahead from the Ethics Committee of the Bucks NHS Trust to conduct the first European “Breast Cancer Detection Trial, using the olfactory powers of dogs.” The Medical Detection Dogs charity was founded in 2007 and, since then, has been training dogs in the UK – and advising clinics in other parts of Europe, Australia and the USA – to detect prostate, renal and bladder cancer, using urine samples. The success rate is staggering – with prostate cancer, the results achieved show a “93 per cent reliability, compared to the 75 per cent of false positives found by the traditional PSA tests”.”

This method of diagnosis may provide significant benefits of such techniques as the mammogram for Metastatic Breast Cancer.

So we strongly recommend Ms Potts’ blog post for more information.

We will certainly following the story closely her at PatientTalk.Org.