Even though doctors diagnose up to 60,000 new cases of Parkinson’s disease each year, there is currently no definitive test for the disease– but one Scottish woman and her remarkable sense of smell could soon revolutionize how the condition is detected.
She is 65-year-old Joy Milne, and according to BBC News and The New York Times, she sensed an unusual “musky” odor on her late husband Les years before he was first diagnosed by doctors. Joy explained that his scent “changed” in a “difficult to describe” way, and that it was “subtle – a musky smell” that did not happen suddenly, but slowly and over the course of time.
It wasn’t until Joy joined the charity Parkinson’s UK, met others with the same distinct smell and mentioned the apparent coincidence to scientists that the link was first established. Experiments followed where the scientists decided to test her abilities.
Dr. Tilo Kunath, a Parkinson’s UK fellow from the Edinburgh University School of Biological Sciences, was one of the first scientists Milne had confided in, and he and his colleagues had the woman sniff t-shirts work by six people with Parkinson’s and six without with disease.
Perfect smell-test score spurs on search for molecular triggers
“The first time we tested Joy we recruited six people with Parkinson’s and six without,” he told the BBC on Thursday. “We had them wear a t-shirt for a day then retrieved the t-shirts, bagged them and coded them. Her job was to tell us who had Parkinson’s and who didn’t.”
She scored 11 out of 12 on the test, correctly detecting all six of the Parkinson’s patients, added Dr. Kunath. However, she was adamant that she could smell the odor on one of the control group members, even though he assured researchers that he was healthy and did not have the disease.
Eight months later, however, he contacted the university and told them that he had just received a Parkinson’s diagnosis, indicating that Milne was apparently correct in her olfactory diagnosis. It so impressed Dr. Kunath and his fellow researchers that they have launched an investigation into the phenomenon, hoping to find a reliable way to detect and diagnose Parkinson’s patients.
They believe that changes in the skin of people with early stage Parkinson’s could produce odd scents associated with the disease, BBC News said. They hope to discover the molecular signal associated with the odor, then devise a simple diagnostic test (such as a forehead swab) to see if a person has the ailment. Studies are currently underway in three UK cities, they added.
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Image credit: BBC
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