Movement disorders: Xiangya Hospital: Can a dog sniff Parkinson's disease?

The diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (PD) is well established by postmortem pathological examination

Figure 1: Paper cover image

In many cases, the time to diagnosis of clinically established PD often takes years

Dogs have long been used to search for illegal drugs, explosives and missing persons

Therefore, Chang-Qing Gao et al.

They found: In a study of drug patients, when two or all three sniffer dogs produced positive test results in the samples tested, the sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative likelihood ratios of the index test were 91, respectively.

Figure 2: The results of the paper

In drug-naïve patients, the corresponding sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative likelihood ratios were 89% (95% CI: 75%-96%) and 86% (95% CI: 81%-91%), respectively.

The significance of the study lies in the discovery that testing using sniffer dogs may be a useful, non-invasive, rapid and cost-effective method to identify PD in community screening and health preventive examinations as well as in neurology practice patients

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