New diagnostic opportunity
Study shows: Corona sniffer dogs can also sniff out long-Covid patients
Corona sniffer dogs like the Belgian shepherd Filou can identify long-Covid patients in a study by the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hanover.
© Ole Spata / DPA
Dogs are known to be able to sniff out viral infections with their extraordinary sense of smell. A study has now shown that they can usually do this even if the PCR test is already negative. This opens up new possibilities in the treatment of Long Covid.
Exhaustion, fatigue, shortness of breath – the effects of a long-Covid illness are often serious. What is particularly stressful is that in many patients it is often not possible to determine what exactly triggers the syndrome. But now a new study promises a solution. According to this, corona detection dogs can not only identify samples from infected people, but also from long-Covid patients. This is reported by a research team led by the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover (TiHo) in the journal “Frontiers in Medicine”.
“It is known that infectious respiratory diseases can release specific volatile organic compounds,” said Holger Volk, head of the TiHo Small Animal Clinic. The results of the new study now support the hypothesis that these links are present in long-term Covid patients after initial infection and are detectable by specially trained dogs.
Corona sniffer dogs still strike if the PCR test is negative
As early as summer 2020, the TiHo researchers published an initial study on sniffer dogs that had been trained to detect corona infections. They were able to identify infected people in saliva and respiratory secretion samples. As a follow-up study showed, sweat and urine are also suitable sample material. There have also been practical tests at concerts.
Now the samples came from long-Covid patients who were treated at the Hannover Medical School (MHH). The virus was no longer detectable in them using a PCR test. According to the TiHo virologist Claudia Schulz, the sniffer dogs can identify long-Covid diseases themselves, even if antibody tests can no longer make any statements about the cause of a disease. The extraordinary diagnostic ability of the dogs enables an optimized treatment of those affected.
Study: Sniffer dogs with an accuracy of 90 percent
In various test scenarios, the scientists in the new study confronted nine corona detection dogs with samples from Sars-Cov-2-infected people, with long-Covid samples and with negative samples. If the dogs were presented with samples from long-Covid patients and those from healthy people for comparison, they recognized the patient samples in over 90 percent of the tests.
According to the research team, dogs are increasingly being used to detect smells in medicine. They are able to detect, for example, various types of cancer, malaria and some bacterial and viral infections.