A dog can teach a lot of important life lessons, no matter whether it is super smart or just a silly one. Moreover, a dog can teach humans to live each day to the fullest, seize the moment, and follow your heart. Mostly, a dog can teach about friendship and selflessness, as well as how to be loyal.
We can learn a lot from dogs. However, besides teaching us how to enjoy life, we humans also share something else with them. Just like in humans, cancer is common in dogs as well.In fact, it is on the rise in pets. This similarity is beneficial to cancer research. Comparative Oncology is a field study that is working towards finding ways to find and cure cancer. Researchers are using Comparative Oncology to find similarities between cancer in pets and cancer in humans to help find clues to treat cancer successfully.
Humans and dogs have a lot in common
You will be surprised to know that dogs have a lot of physiologic and genetic similarities to humans! In fact, this similarity is even more than mice. However, mice do not live long enough for us to find whether they naturally get cancer or not. Although the fact is that rats can get cancer, but sincethat is not natural, scientists inject them with cancer in labs. A few years back, scientists discovered that dogs have more than 80 percent genetic similarity to humans, whereas mice have only 67 percent similarity to people.
Besides that, various cancer types, such as bladder and lymphoma cancer that arise naturally in pet dogs are quite similar to cancers in humans. Studies show that genetic mutations that lead to cancer in people are the same mutations that cause cancer in your canine friend.
Fluffy friends with cancer are actually helping kids
There is a bone cancer known as osteosarcoma which is similar between dogs and humans. It has helped in treating osteosarcoma in children. Safe and effective bone tumor surgery techniques that are used in dogs are now being implemented in children with bone cancer as well. Furthermore, there is a form of immunotherapy that helped improve the survival rate in dogs with bone cancer, which is being used in humans too. It is a treatment that has the ability to stop the spread of cancer to the lungs.
These types of discoveries prove that our four-legged friends play a crucial role in helping people fight the war against cancer. Now almost all new cancer treatments that show the effective result in our canine companions are predicted to be beneficial for human cancer patients as well.