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.

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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.