I can smell when people have cancer | Hacker News Reader

I can smell when people have cancer

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18 pointsnixass9 comments

Also, a decade or so ago, a woman noticed a change in smell of her husband when he got Parkinson's [1]. She can smell the disease on people. I believe some dog's can also smell disease such as cancer. This sort of thing is a "super-power" I hope science can nail down and harness somehow.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-62795737

dog's can

> I actually tried contacting some researchers locally, because I live near a university hospital that does a lot of research into testing for cancer. They basically said it was impossible and to stop wasting their time… like damn okay sorry

Too bad. I guess a blind study with a control group wouldn't be too hard to conduct. Worst case, it was a waste of time. Otherwise, might lead to interesting discoveries.

It was clearly wrong for them to be immediately dismissive of the claim (particularly since there are a number of existing studies that support it).

> I guess a blind study with a control group wouldn't be too hard to conduct.

However, you would be surprised how difficult this is to do. As soon as you are doing any sort of research involving human beings, even if that research is plainly innocuous for the subjects and technically easy to conduct, everything gets very complicated due to regulations meant to prevent misconduct and abuse.

I agree, but even with all the authorizations, it looks like a hard problem. You need like 20 persons with cancer. Before starting chemo? A matching group of 20 healthy persons. What about symptoms of cancer, like big moles in skin cancer or low weight in colon cancer?

Since the person with/without cancer know the situation, they may give involuntary hints. Just sedate them so they are sleeping while testing?

What if the person can detect some cancers and no others?

I saw this too, not Shure if a reddit post is HN worthy. Regardless, I think there are studies in dogs, but I have not heard of human smelling cancer.and there are multiple people (?) claiming it in the comments.

I have pretty good sense of smell and as I'm aging I've noticed I started to smell like my grandfather who died pretty early of cancer. Could be just caked on, work-from-home type of sweat.

Prob smelling the waste products from sweat glands from the immune response. Like smelling post workout sweat and knowing someone owns a gym bag.

Very useful if you can dial it in.

Still suspect that it was posted on April 1. A little patience might have been better for him if it’s legit.

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