Family Dog Wouldn’t Stop Whining Around a Baby. Doctors Found the Baby’s Heart Beating 280 Times a Minute

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An untrained Doberman's strange behavior helped uncover a potentially dangerous heart condition.

Saraya wouldn’t leave the baby alone.

The Doberman paced, whined, and repeatedly licked five-month-old Alexander’s face. Whenever someone moved him away, the dog became even more agitated. His mother, Kim Reynolds, couldn’t understand what had gotten into the family dog.

Then, hours later, the baby began screaming uncontrollably. No attempt to comfort the baby worked.

Remembering Saraya’s strange behavior, Reynolds took Alexander to the emergency room. Doctors discovered his heart was racing at 280 beats per minute. He had a potentially dangerous heart rhythm disorder that had gone undetected since birth.

Saraya had no special training. Yet her life-saving behavior helped alert the family to something seriously wrong, a reminder of how sometimes dogs can detect medical emergencies before humans recognize the warning signs.

Alexander was diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a condition caused by an extra electrical pathway in the heart.

Normally, electrical signals follow a controlled route that keeps the heart beating rhythmically. In people with this syndrome, an extra connection can allow signals to circulate repeatedly, triggering an abnormally fast heartbeat called supraventricular tachycardia (SVT).

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In infants, SVT can drive the heart to up to an astonishing 300 beats per minute.

The condition can be particularly difficult to recognize in babies if you don’t listen to their hearts. Instead of reporting palpitations or dizziness, infants may simply become irritable, feed poorly, breathe rapidly, or appear unusually pale.

“It’s like running a marathon as fast as you possibly can and never taking a break,” Vassilios Bezzerides, a cardiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told The Washington Post.

Doctors initially tried cold-water stimulation to activate a reflex that can slow the heart. When that failed, intravenous medication restored Alexander’s normal rhythm.

He now takes the beta blocker propranolol three times daily and is doing well, although he may eventually require a procedure to correct the abnormal electrical pathway.

But how did Saraya know something was wrong?

One possibility involves the dog’s extraordinary sense of smell.

Our bodies continuously release chemical compounds through our breath and sweat. When our physiology changes, the mixture of these compounds can change too.

In a 2022 study published in PLOS ONE, researchers led by Clara Wilson at Queen’s University Belfast investigated whether dogs could distinguish the smell of a stressed person from that same person’s normal scent. Four trained dogs examined breath and sweat samples collected from 36 volunteers before and after a stressful mental arithmetic task.

The results were striking. Across 720 discrimination trials, the dogs correctly identified the stress samples 93.75% of the time.

Dogs’ remarkable noses have also shown promise in cancer detection. In a 2011 study published in the journal Gut, a specially trained Labrador retriever identified colorectal cancer from patients’ breath samples with 91% sensitivity and from stool samples with 97% sensitivity. Other experiments have found that dogs can distinguish samples from people with lung, breast, and prostate cancers. Scientists suspect that tumors produce distinctive combinations of chemical compounds that dogs can smell. However, a 2023 systematic review found that accuracy varied enormously between studies, and the evidence remains too inconsistent to use dogs as reliable clinical screening tools.

Moreover, dogs also possess sensitive hearing — although there’s no way of telling for now whether Saraya could detect the baby’s heartbeat — and can notice subtle behavioral changes that people overlook.

“The dog noticed something strange in an individual that the dog had a strong emotional connection to, and that’s all it takes,” Clive Wynne, an animal behavior researcher at Arizona State University, also told The Washington Post.

Saraya’s case isn’t entirely unprecedented.

Dogs have been reported alerting their owners to seizures, blood sugar changes, and other medical problems, sometimes without formal training.

A 2016 study of trained diabetes-alert dogs found that they provided timely warnings for only 36% of low-blood-sugar episodes. ms.

Interestingly, Saraya later became unusually attentive to Alexander again. His mother sought medical care, fearing another cardiac episode. This time, doctors diagnosed bacterial tonsillitis.

The second incident suggests that Saraya’s behavior might not have been specific to his heart condition.

For researchers, the intriguing possibility is that ordinary pets sometimes notice signs of illness without being taught what to look for. Establishing how often that happens, and what the animals actually detect, will require more than remarkable anecdotes.

For Reynolds, however, Saraya’s behavior was enough to make her seek help when her baby needed it.

And that may have made all the difference.

Tags: animal intelligencecanine sense of smelldog behaviordogsheart arrhythmiamedical alert dogsmedical detection dogssupraventricular tachycardiaWolff-Parkinson-White syndrome

Aerospace engineer with a passion for biology, paleontology, and physics.