Projects & Grants

Internal Grant Competition DGC
START-UP grant





Assessment of heart rate changes in early detection of lung cancer (pilot study)
Project IdSGS20/LF/2022
Main solverMgr. Petra Riedlová, Ph.D.
Period1/2022 - 12/2022
ProviderSpecifický VŠ výzkum
Statefinished
AnotationLung cancer is currently a very serious and frequent disease. Today, around 6,500 cases are diagnosed annually in the CZ. Unfortunately, there are currently no early warning signs that can detect lung cancer in the preclinical and early stages. The tumor is diagnosed in the vast majority only in the last stage and the five-year survival of the patient is only 10 %. Not only for this reason, the Czech Center of Signal Animals (CCSA) was founded in the CZ, which tries to detect a tumor in humans at a preclinical stage by means of special training of dogs. This pre-diagnosis already works in the world, in the CZ the CCSA is the only center. There are now six dogs in training for a lung tumor, four of who can catch the tumor with up to 90% sensitivity. The publication on this topic is currently under review in the journal Complementary Therapies in Medicine. However, this method needs to be further validated, and it is this project that would support. In a dog it is possible to determine, based on heart rate, whether the dog really and with what accuracy can capture tumor cells from the patient's sample among non-tumor samples. This is a special technique, which is based on foreign studies, where they deal with the overall behavior of the dog in finding a tumor sample. However, it seems that just finding the heart rate could be enough for this. This study has never been performed in the CZ. This SGS study would help to increase the validation of the tumor detection method by the dog at an early stage and would be unique in the use and evaluation of heart rate. The result would be an evaluation of whether the dog's behavior really changes when finding an unknown positive sample among unknown negative samples.