According to MSN Health and Fitness News on October 23, Milne said that she detected a change of odor coming from her husband Les in the years before he developed any symptoms.
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Joy Milne, 65, told researchers that she had noticed a change in the dour of her late husband, Les, years before he developed symptoms of Parkinson’s.
“It wasn’t until we moved back to Scotland, to Perth, and we went to the Parkinson’s group and when I went into the room, I thought ‘Oh the smell is stronger, ‘” she told Sky News.
Milne later joined the charity Parkinson’s United Kingdom and was able to associate the peculiar musky smell with people who have the disease. What amazed scientists was that at the time she got them all right except for one shirt that she said it belonged to a Parkinson’s diagnosed patient.
Curious about Mrs. Milne’s claim that she can sniff Parkinson’s disease patients, scientists from The University of Manchester and the University of Edinburgh have decided to make a team and study if what the woman says is true. She identified 11 out of the 12 correct, but was adamant one of the control subjects had the disease. They gathered 12 volunteers, six were diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and the other six weren’t.
Milne was able to determine who had the disease and who did not, with nearly 100 percent accuracy.
For their research, 200 people with or without Parkinson’s are being recruited to take part in this study.
“We were quite impressed”, Dr. Tilo Kunath told the BBC.
But hold the phone, she was actually 12-12. Doctors told her he didn’t, but Kunath confirmed that eight months later, the man had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
Kathryn Scott Osler/Denver Post via Getty Images Researchers at the University of Colorado Denver use human stem cells to research the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease. Doctors believe changes in the skin of people with Parkinson’s might produce a particular odor.
They want to identify the molecular signature responsible for this smell and then develop a diagnostic tool or test to identify patients by as simple a method as swabbing. Approximately 7-10 million people, including 1 million Americans, are living with the disease, according to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation.
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Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system, and it now has not cured.
