There has been considerable controversy about whether animals such as dogs can detect hypoglycemia in their diabetic owners, and such reports do occasionally surface in the popular media. In 2008, the UK charity Diabetes UK announced that they were helping to fund a project, performed by researchers at Queen's University Belfast and the University of Lincoln, looking at whether dogs really can detect hypoglycemia. This research is being conducted under the supervision of Deborah Wells, at Queen's University Belfast. A report on the project can be found in the Diabetes UK magazine ''Balance''. This article quotes Wells as saying that dogs' acute sense of smell may help them to detect low blood sugar.
Some four years earlier, Alyson Jones had an article published in ''Balance'', discussing this topic. This article cited a research study which suggested that over a third of dogs living with people with diabetes would show behavioural changes when their owner's blood sugar level had dropped to hypoglycemic levels. One suggestion was that dogs could be picking up on pheromones, given that sweating can be a sign of early hypoglycemia; a suggestion made by Chris Laurence, the then veterinary director of the Dogs Trust (formerly the National Canine Defence League). However, the article warned that there was no guarantee that dogs would always detect hypos and that "people with diabetes should not rely on their pets for this".
Further Reading
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article on
"Diabetic hypoglycemia"
All material adapted used from Wikipedia is available under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Wikipedia® itself is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.