Dogs Can Smell Epileptic Seizures Before They Happen

Man's best friend can not only fend off burglars or herd farm animals or sniff out bombs and drugs but can also predict epileptic seizures, according to researchers at Queen's University Belfast (QUB), Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) reported.

Photo Insert: Seizures are associated with a specific smell that is detectable by pet dogs, the study found.

The seizures "are associated with a specific smell which is detectable by pet dogs," a university-led research team in Northern Ireland said.

Anecdotes around behavioral changes in dogs suggest they can sense impending seizures, but no scientific study had until now "investigated the veracity of these claims," QUB said, in findings published on Tuesday in the journal MDPI Animals.

Powell's team's findings could help develop a "potentially life-saving early warning system" for the world's 65 million people who live with epilepsy, around 30 percent of whom "cannot control their seizures by medication."

Powell and team exposed 19 pet dogs "with no experience of epilepsy" to smells "characteristic of three seizure phases" derived from the sweat of epilepsy sufferers.

Depending on the breed, a dog's sense of sense of smell has been put at anything from 10,000 to 100,000 times more powerful than what the human nose manages. Neil Powell of QUB's School of Biological Sciences said the "extraordinary sense of smell of dogs" offers "a reliable source to detect an on-set seizure."

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