Posted on 10/26/2015 9:42:41 AM PDT by Theoria
Joy Milne has always had a keen sense of smell, so she was unfazed when her husband, Les, began emitting a subtle musky odor.
He was an anesthesiologist who worked long hours, and Milne assumed the smell was just sweat. But with the change in scent came a growing tiredness that was explained by a devastating diagnosis six years later: Les had Parkinson’s disease.
“I could always smell things other people couldn’t smell,” Milne said during a BBC broadcast Thursday. After attending a meeting for the charity Parkinson’s UK, where the other Parkinson’s patients shared her husband’s musky scent, she realized that the odor might be tied to the condition.
After the 65-year-old Perth woman off-handedly mentioned this observation to a few scientists, they decided to investigate.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh gave T-shirts to six people with Parkinson’s and six people without the disease. After the subjects wore the shirts, they were passed on to Milne, who then had to determine by smell whether each wearer had Parkinson’s.
Her diagnoses were eerily accurate — and have potentially groundbreaking implications for people living with the disease.
Milne made correct assessments for 11 out of the 12 cases. In the one case she got “wrong,” she insisted that a T-shirt worn by a member of the control group had the warning scent.
Eight months after the study was conducted, she was proven right, bringing her accuracy rate up to one hundred. The supposedly healthy individual contacted one of the doctors and informed him that he had, in fact, just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I watched the BBC interview with the doctor who had this project. In his opinion, it’s a game-changer. And he says that he’s had several other people to come around and note they could smell the same thing. The problem is...how you package this and start to identify how the scent occurs.
She could really start a cottage industry here with her sense of smell.
Hey, a new perfume line. Eu de la parkinsense.
Cool that she has this gift.
I know a woman who says that she can smell cancer. She detected it in her husband before the doctors did.
If she can do this I bet you could train a Labrador to do exactly the same thing.
I once did a project with a well known food company - met a young woman whose sense of smell was just bizarre. She was also a trained food chemist, so by sniffing a bottle of juice or a bottle of tea, could tell which flavor chemicals were added in approx. what proportions. off-notes or variances that were imperceptible to others stood out like a beacon to her.
While it seems like it would require her or another person who can identify the scent to be involved, what this really indicates is that Parkinson’s creates a chemical change to the body, in particular to the gases emitted from the pores, that gives early indication of the onset of the disease.
What they need to do is identify this chemical change and then they can test it in a routine way for people who might be at risk of Parkinson’s disease.
Don’t joke about this terrible disease until you visit patients in an assisted-living home. May God protect you from this desease.
What... exactly... does she smell?
Sigh. Sometimes the best way to deal with a terrible disease is to occasionally lighten up. A joke is one way to punch darkness in the mouth.
Wonder how she does rabbit hunting.
Thank you. Grew up with two of those. One of Mother Natures masterpieces.
Parkinsons is brought on by a chemical change in the brain. The brain produces less dopamine in Parkinsons patients. It seems possible this change in body chemistry could produce an odor change.
LOL, that’s so bad.
If the chemical signature can be adequately quantified, then machines can be created that detect it.
Thanks Theoria.
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