72-year-old Joy Milne is known as “the woman who can smell Parkinson’s.”
Milne, a retired nurse from Perth, Scotland, had noticed a change in how her husband smelled. She’d picked up a “musty” and “rather unpleasant” scent from around his shoulders and the back of his neck, “and his skin had definitely changed,” she told the .
The Scottish woman—as it turns out—has Hyperosmia, which is an elevated sensitivity to smells, enabling her to detect Parkinson’s disease before it is even noticeable to doctors. Her husband Les, then 33 years old, was medically diagnosed with the brain disorder more than 12 years later. Les passed away in 2015.
Milne only became aware of her unusual abilities after meeting a Parkinson’s UK support group with her husband and realizing that they had a similar smell.
Scientists were curious about what her nose was picking up on. To sniff this out, they first got her to smell T-shirts worn by a group of Parkinson’s patients and another group who did not have the disease. Milne correctly pointed out the T-shirts that were worn by the patients, but strangely included one shirt from the control group. The person who wore that tee was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease eight months later.
Now, Milne is helping researchers at the University of Manchester develop a skin-swab test that can apparently detect the disease in just three minutes. According to the team members, who have recently detailed their findings in the , this method has been 95% accurate in lab settings.
Directed by Milne’s heightened sense of smell, the scientists have pinpointed the source of the Parkinson’s odor to the molecules in sebum, or skin oil. Out of 4,000 unique compounds collected from the sebum of participants, they found 500 which were consistent with Parkinson’s patients.
The new test can be done by simply swiping a cotton swab down the back of the neck, as the sebum here doesn’t get washed off as thoroughly as other parts of the body. It’s presumably why Milne had found the change in her husband’s scent most apparent in this general area.
So far, there is no cure for Parkinson’s. Importantly, there is also no clear diagnostic test—medical professionals can only diagnose the disease after identifying patients’ symptoms, which can take months or even years to detect, and after peering at their medical history.
The simple, three-minute swab test is still at its early stages of research, and will require further testing to determine its efficacy. With that being said, its developers are looking forward to the day Parkinson’s can properly be validated.
A system such as this, usable by clinics and general practitioners, would be “transformative,” described the study’s lead researcher Prof Perdita Barran. Parkinson’s disease is the fastest-growing neurological disorder in the world, and advanced detection would allow patients to be prepared for their later years. When a cure finally arrives, the test could be lifesaving.
If all goes well, the team is hoping to trial the skin-swab test in Manchester within the next couple of years.
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