Presentation Description / Summary: Dogs have an extraordinary sense of smell, which humans have taken advantage of in various settings for thousands of years. Recent studies showed that dogs are also able to distinguish the olfactory fingerprints of various infectious and non-infectious diseases from healthy controls, based on the emission of specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs) resulting from disease-specific metabolic processes. In the last two years, approximately 70 groups in 60 countries have researched and partially deployed the dog's ability to detect SARS-CoV-2-infections. Dogs proved to act as a very rapid testing alternative being able to analyze samples within seconds. Thus, although dogs have been shown to be suitable for pandemic containment, many inconsistencies and uncertainties remain in the conduct of the studies (e.g., differences in study design, backgrounds of dogs, training paradigms, specimen types and processing, etc.). This presentation represents a comprehensive summary of those factors, which can have a sensitive influence on canine performance, and describes basics, which contribute to a better understanding of the olfactory perception. We will discuss further why olfaction is often ignored in clinical neurology but has a major influence on dog's normal behaviour. We will discuss how we can improve our neurological assessment of this important canine sense.
Learner Outcomes: 1. To understand how canines' olfaction can be used as a diagnostic test to identify diseases such as COVID-19 2. To understand the importance of canine olfaction for dog's behaviour and how this knowledge can be transferred into clinical practice
Learning Objectives:
To understand how canines' olfaction can be used as a diagnostic test to identify diseases such as COVID-19
To understand the importance of canine olfaction for dog's behaviour and how this knowledge can be transferred into clinical practice
