Now, United Kingdom researchers are to investigate the possibility of an early diagnosis for Parkinson’s disease using smell. Eight months later, Joy’s prediction was proved true. “It wasn’t all of a sudden”, Milne told the BBC.
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Joy, 65, who lost her husband, Les, earlier this year, said: “I’ve always had a keen sense of smell and I detected very early on that there was a very subtle change in how Les smelled”.
Joy, from Perth, was at a Parkinson’s United Kingdom research meeting at Edinburgh University three years ago when she told researcher Dr Tilo Kunath and his colleagues about her uncanny ability. Scientists were impressed when she accurately determined 11 out of 12 cases, even though she smelled Parkinson’s on one of the t-shirts from a person without the disease. But Joy said that the scent came from the collar area of her husband’s shirts, not the armpit.
What she initially thought was merely the smell of sweat from her anesthesiologist husband, Les, was later believed by doctors to be the scent of Parkinson’s disease, which had developed throughout the course of six years.
More than 6.3 million people worldwide have Parkinson’s disease.
Scientists believe that the disease may cause a change in the sebum – an oily substance secreted by the skin – that results in a unique and subtle odour only detectable by people with an acute sense of smell.
“It could be strong with somebody, it could be weaker with somebody else, so that in actual fact whether they were controlled, or their disease was getting worse or their actual medication was working, I could actually identify”.
Now a team of researchers is set out to examine 200 people that either have or does not have the disease across the United Kingdom to determine if they emit a particular odor that could give away the disease prior to being detected medically.
Parkinson’s, which has no cure or diagnostic test, affects 127,000 people in the United Kingdom, leaving them struggling to walk, speak and sleep. These participants wore a t-shirt for one whole day, and the researchers bagged and coded these shirts.
If proven, it could lead to earlier diagnosis of the condition in thousands of people.
“Funding pioneering studies like this has the potential to throw Parkinson’s into a completely new light”.
Parkinson’s disease is caused by the loss of nerve cells in a part of the brain, leading to involuntary tremors, stiffness and slowness of movement.
The skin swabs will also be assessed by Mrs. Milne and a number of smell experts from the food and drink industry.
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In a report by WebMD, Professor Perdita Barran, a scientist from the University of Manchester, hopes that the results of this study could help develop a test that could be used to detect the early stages of Parkinson’s before physical signs emerge.
