Study confirms pet dogs can predict epileptic seizures

There have been anecdotal accounts of pet dogs predicting their owner's epileptic seizures by becoming attentive and demonstrating attention-seeking behaviours

Dogs can predict epileptic seizures, offering a warning sign to owners that has the potential to save lives, new research has found.

Epileptic seizures are associated with a specific smell that is detectable by pet dogs. Scientists at Queen's University Belfast analysed the reaction of dogs to odours and found they could predict when a seizure was imminent.

A reliable early warning system to make people with epilepsy aware of an impending seizure has the potential to save lives, reduce injury, provide an opportunity for medical intervention and return a sense of independence to those living with unpredictable seizures.

Epilepsy is a debilitating and potentially life-threatening neurological condition which affects approximately 65 million people worldwide, of whom 30% are unable to control their seizures by medication.

There is currently no reliable and simple early warning seizure-onset device available, which means many people with unstable epilepsy live in fear of injury or sudden death and the negative impact of social stigmatisation.

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There have been anecdotal accounts of pet dogs predicting their owner's epileptic seizures by becoming attentive and demonstrating attention-seeking behaviours, but to date no scientific study has investigated the veracity of these claims.

Lead researcher Dr Neil Powell, from the School of Biological Sciences at Queen's, said: "We hypothesised that, given the extraordinary sense of smell of dogs, a volatile organic compound exhaled by the dog's epileptic owner may provide an early warning trigger mechanism to which make dogs react before the seizure.

"The results have shown pet dogs to be a reliable source to detect an onset seizure."

The study has been published in the journal MDPI Animals.

Using 19 pet dogs with no experience of epilepsy, the researchers exposed them to odours that were deemed to be characteristic of three seizure phases, by using sweat harvested from people with epilepsy.

They found that all 19 dogs demonstrated more affiliative behavioural changes when confronted by seizure-associated odours, compared with their response to control odours.