A detection dog for obstructive sleep apnea: could it work in diagnostics?

Area of Science:

• Medical diagnostics
• Animal-assisted diagnostics
• Respiratory medicine

Background:

• Dogs possess a keen sense of smell, enabling olfaction-based detection.
• Previous studies showed dogs can distinguish obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) patient urine from healthy controls.

Purpose of the Study:

• To prospectively evaluate the efficacy of trained dogs as a screening tool for OSA.
• To assess dogs' ability to identify sleep apnea in patients with suspected OSA.

Main Methods:

• Collected urine samples from 50 patients with suspected OSA.
• Classified samples as positive for OSA if the respiratory event index was ≥5/h.
• Assessed the accuracy of two trained dogs in a prospective, blinded setting.

Main Results:

• Both dogs correctly identified approximately 50% of both positive and negative OSA samples.
• No significant difference was observed in dogs' ability to detect severe versus milder OSA cases.

Conclusions:

• Dogs are currently unsuitable for clinical screening of obstructive sleep apnea.
• The heterogeneous nature of OSA may contribute to the dogs' limited diagnostic accuracy.