Press. Voanews.
Dogs can be
trained to sniff out drugs and explosives, so Mark Ruefenacht wondered if their
exquisite sense of smell could be used to detect changes in a diabetic’s blood
sugar level. A near fatal episode prompted the forensic scientist, who’s had
diabetes for most of his adult life, to ask that question. In 1999, while he
was training a puppy to be a guide dog for the blind, his blood sugar suddenly
dropped to a dangerously low level.
“More than
likely, I had a seizure, from the low blood sugar,” Ruefenacht recalled, as he
explained how the puppy kept trying to rouse him. “And he stuck with me and I
was able to get my blood sugar up.” That incident made him wonder if dogs could
be trained to detect the inherent chemical changes that accompany a drop in
blood sugar, called hypoglycemia, then alert their owners.
Dogs4Diabetics
Ruefenacht
worked with scientists and funded research which determined that the “smell” of
hypoglycemia shows up in both breath and sweat. He also worked with and studied
professionals who train dogs to sniff out everything from explosives to cancer.
And most important of all, Ruefenacht started training a fun-loving yellow
Labrador retriever named Armstrong to alert him when he was having a
dangerously low blood sugar. The training proved so successful, Armstrong is
listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first diabetes-detection
dog.
Sitting under a
poster of Armstrong, who died in 2012, Ruefenacht recalls that those early
successes led some organizations to offer him large sums of money for the
rights to his discoveries. Ruefenacht says he turned those opportunities down.
Instead, in 2004, he founded Dogs4Diabetics.
He says properly
training a diabetes detection dog and its owner can cost $50,000. The
organization raises money to cover these expenses, then provides the dogs at no
cost to people who qualify.
The smell of
hypoglycemia
The dogs are
trained to identify the scent of hypoglycemia on a reliable and consistent
basis. Ruefenacht uses jars containing swabs of sweat from a diabetic who had
low blood sugar, randomly mixed with jars of other distracting smells, such as
peanut butter, dog food and eucalyputus. The dogs are rewarded when they select
the correct jar. This "sweat jar" method for training diabetes alert
dogs has been validated scientifically.
The next step is
to teach them to alert their owner. The dogs are trained to use subtle signals,
but if those go unnoticed, to put their paws on his lap, or balance on their
back legs and put their front paws on his shoulders. They learn to snuffle at
his nose and mouth, lick his face and bark. And if all else fails, they’re
trained to get someone else to come and help.
Ruefenacht says
the dogs are often aware of blood sugar drops long before electronic monitoring
systems send a warning alarm. Dogs4Diabetics has placed more than 100 dogs with
diabetics. They hope to expand the program - training humanity's most loyal
companion to save lives and help diabetics around the world.
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