Peggy Gibson, a 67-year-old retired nurse, is one of more than a million Americans with Type 1 diabetes, a difficult-to-manage autoimmune disease. People with the disease face a constant struggle to control the amount of sugar in their bloodstream. If it gets too low, it can lead to seizures, loss of consciousness, or death.

Gibson’s community helped her raise money for Rocky, an alert dog specially trained to smell dangerous changes in someone’s blood sugar. 

But while Gibson obviously loves Rocky, he doesn’t provide the service she and her neighbors paid for. Unfortunately, that may be par for the course. The diabetic alert dog industry is unstandardized and largely unregulated. And the science on a dog’s ability to reliably sniff out blood sugar changes may not be “reliable or accurate.”

NPR Investigations: The Hope And Hype Of Diabetic Alert Dogs

Image Credit: Robert Benincasa/NPR