Dr. Yin's Animal Behavior and Medicine Blog
Dogs Detect Cluster Headaches in Human
Posted On: Sunday, October 25th, 2009
By Sophia Yin, DVM.
Last week when lecturing at a seminar with Sarah Kalnajs, I watched an interesting video that Sarah showed. When her friend who had a history of cluster headaches was visiting her, Sarah's dogs performed an unusual behavior. Typically they would hang back instead of interacting with the visitor but in this case they climbed onto his lap and kept licking his face, especially in the area of his right eye. At the time her friend did not have a headache but 10 minutes later he felt one coming on. As it was starting to occur, he warned that the dogs might start to become aggressive to him. His warning was based on a past dog he had owned. He'd owned the dog for at least a year prior to the start of his cluster headaches and the dog was a well-loved part of the family. Once he started having the headaches, the dog's behavior changed. Just prior to the headaches, the dog would avoid him. But when the headaches occurred, the dog would become aggressive. As a result he had to rehome the dog with someone who didn't have this type of medical condition.
Sarah's dogs did not become aggressive to the visitor, they did however get more excited and lick the right eye, the area from which the headaches eminated, more vigorously.
Given that dogs have 20x more olfactory receptors than humans, it's not surprising that they would pick up scents eminating from humans that we humans are completely unaware exist.
If any of you readers have first hand experience with such detection, please chime in. What were they detecting? And did you or others end up using the dog as a detection dog?
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Comments
That's really interesting. I guess it's good he had done some scent work with her earlier! Thanks for sharing. What is her personality. Is she very attuned to people and seeks attention a lot from them? Soft or sensitive personality? Or does she just love to sniff things?
Sophia
I'm part of the percentage of migraine sufferers who have a distinct "aura phase", before I ever have any pain at all from the headache. If I take painkillers during this phase, my migraine will be severely diminished, if not entirely mitigated. Elka knows somehow to alert me during this stage. It's an unpolished, spontaneous (i.e., I didn't teach it) behavior at this point: she'll stare at me, whine, not leave me alone. Unfortunately, this sort of behavior can be par for the course in everyday life, but I've been working on listening to the dog more, and trying to discern the causes of her whines. And sometimes, those whines mean I'm headed for Headache Land pretty quickly. You can bet I reward her for that!
(I wrote about it a little bit on my blog here, http://theelkaalmanac.blogspot.com/2011/04/service-dogs-ins-and-outs.html )
My husbands dog is a very busy girl who loves to work. Normally a bit towards the 'hard' personality side, but very easy to train. She is a herding breed. She loves people because they toss her ball, but not much on snuggling or petting - too busy. She only asks for petting/attention late evening or early morning. She is normally off doing something, keeping track of where we are, but not hanging too close to us.
When my husband was ill she altered her behavior. Never leaving his side, being deliberate and quiet around him, sleeping by him during the day, often with his hand on her back.
She loves to sniff, her world is her nose, but this was focused like she does with her scent work.
Susan
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His dog would focus on a particular spot on his bandaging (heavy surgical pad type) breathing/sniffing deeply. When we responded to her behavior she would stop.
Invariably there was an infected spot where she was indicating. We began to put a marker spot and the nurse would check there first. Sometimes not an obvious spot, but always something there on investigation. She was completely reliable on this.
Now we always investigate if she is sniffing another of our dogs and usually find something. On ourselves we will go recleanse a wound we have if she sniffs the bandaging, just in case.
She seems to have added this detection to her job description. My husband had done other scent/indication work with this dog before his illness, and now continues to work with her in that area..