About the Dogs of PADs for Parkinson's
A dog’s sense of smell is up to 100,000 more acute than that of a human’s. Dogs can detect tiny amounts of odor-- around one part per trillion. This means dogs can detect a teaspoon of sugar in a million gallons of water; or two Olympic-sized pools. A dog can detect one rotten piece of apple within two million barrels. When making an analogy to human vision, what you can see at 1/3 mile away, a dog could see at more than 3000 miles away, just as clearly.
Since March 2016, PADs has trained more than 25 dogs to successfully select Parkinson's samples from healthy human control samples with an accuracy rating of 90% or higher. The 18 dogs currently in the Program attend training between two and four days per week and our homed locally by their owner/handlers. Each PAD (Parkinson's Alert Dog) has worked between 50 and 350 individual days and has received between 400 and 3500 exposures to Parkinson's Disease samples.
PADs is represented by a variety of breeds and mixed breeds of dog, ranging from American and English Labrador Retrievers to a Pomeranian. Any dog with a high drive for work and problem-solving can be successful as a PAD.