'Lab' testing - could dogs smell ME/CFS?

This is a bit of an aside, but I wonder if dogs can detect whether or not someone is in PEM due to a tiny difference in their smell? They're such amazing animals that it wouldn't surprise me. And if they could, it's a potential biomarker.

Probably a nonsensical idea, but...
 
Kitty said:
I wonder if dogs can detect whether or not someone is in PEM due to a tiny difference in their smell? They're such amazing animals that it wouldn't surprise me. And if they could, it's a potential biomarker.
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I reckon so.

My first dog would try to usher me upstairs for "our" nap. My second dog ID seemed to know too.

IRD less so, but then he was already 5 when he arrived and what with home working being a thing spends more time with my husband than with me.

The only thing is, they could be picking up on unconscious behaviour indicative of PEM as easily as a scent. Possibly both.

They can be very, very observant.
 
Invisible Woman said:
The only thing is, they could be picking up on unconscious behaviour indicative of PEM as easily as a scent. Possibly both.
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I guess to test these things, you need to use clothing from the person rather than have them present, so that you can be sure it's not another kind of cue. Not that anyone would ever fund such a study anyway, but it's still an interesting thought!
 
Forget dogs, they eat too much and take too long to train. Insects are so much more economical.

Cell: Ants detect cancer cells through volatile organic compounds, Baptiste Piqueret et al, 2022
Highlights

Ants can rapidly be conditioned to associate the odor of cancer cells with a reward

Ants discriminate between cancerous and healthy cells and between two cancerous lines

Discrimination relies on volatile organic compounds that are specific of cell lines

Summary

Cancer is among the world’s leading causes of death. A critical challenge for public health is to develop a noninvasive, inexpensive, and efficient tool for early cancer detection. Cancer cells are characterized by an altered metabolism, producing unique patterns of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that can be used as cancer biomarkers. Dogs can detect VOCs via olfactory associative learning, but training dogs is costly and time-consuming. Insects, such as ants, have a refined sense of smell and can be rapidly trained. We show that individual ants need only a few training trials to learn, memorize, and reliably detect the odor of human cancer cells. These performances rely on specific VOC patterns, as shown by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. Our findings suggest that using ants as living tools to detect biomarkers of human cancer is feasible, fast, and less laborious than using other animals.
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open access: https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(22)00229-2

I can't help wondering what VOC patterns - which reflect metabolism - might show in ME.
 
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