65-year-old Woman Assures That She Can Smell Parkinson’s Disease

Should the assumption be confirmed that the development of Parkinson’s disease is accompanied by changes in smell, medicine would get a new, powerful tool for diagnosis and therapy in their hands

Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease that continues to progress after diagnosis and therefore causes great anxiety in the population.

The number of cases is increasing every year, although at the present time an early diagnosis is not yet a matter of course. The therapy of Parkinson’s disease continues to pose major problems for medical professionals and the progression of neurodegeneration has not yet been stopped.

Great efforts are therefore being made to find ways that allow early detection of Parkinson’s disease, for example via changes in body odor.

The testimony of a 65-year-old British woman named Joy Milne, who assured that she could smell Parkinson’s disease, caused a stir.

There is the hypothesis that changes in the skin of those affected take place in the very early stages of the disease, modify the body odor and thereby make the disease recognizable.

Years before the official diagnosis that her husband had Parkinson’s disease, Joy Milne was able to perceive an altered body odor in him.

Woman smells Parkinson’s disease

Joy Milne is of Australian origin and has a talent that she shares with few other people: at the age of 65, she has the ability to perceive Parkinson’s disease through the body odor of those affected while the disease is still in its very early stages.

Milne discovered this many years ago when she suddenly became aware that her husband’s body odor had changed. She alone had noticed these changes.

He died in 2015 at the age of 65 after battling this neurodegenerative disease for 20 years.

Milne had noticed this particular smell in her husband before the doctors could make an accurate diagnosis. For a long time, however, she was not aware of what caused this change in body odor.

In her statements to the BBC, Milne stated that she could “smell things that other people couldn’t.”

She has also stated that about six years before the official medical diagnosis, she had noticed changes in her husband’s body odor that would last until the end of his life.

“His body odor was different and difficult to describe. The change did not occur suddenly. It was all very subtle, like a smell of musk, ” she recalls.

Scientists have tested Joy’s talent

With these surprising explanations, the native Australian caught the attention of scientists.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh were particularly interested in their statements. You made the decision to test the hypothesis. Is it really possible for a person to perceive a changed body odor in a fellow human being if they have Parkinson’s disease?

Twelve subjects were used for the study, half of whom had Parkinson’s disease while the other six were healthy.

It was now up to Joy Milne to identify those suffering from the neurodegenerative disease. She did not see the test subjects, only smelled the shirts that they had been wearing for a day.

Tilo Kunath is researching Parkinson’s disease in the biology department of the aforementioned university. He was visibly surprised by the result of the experiment. Milne had been correct with her diagnosis of eleven out of twelve subjects.

But Milne didn’t just recognize the six patients who had already been diagnosed. She was  also certain that a subject from the healthy control group suffered from the disease.

In fact, this subject was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease less than a year later.

Milnes’ hit rate was now 100% and she was referred to in the media as a “super nose”.

Your ability will continue to be the subject of research. A project has been developed to find out which molecules lead to these changes in body odor.

The UK Parkinson’s Foundation will fund the research

A UK charitable Parkinson’s Foundation will fund a study to be carried out in Edinburgh, Manchester and London. Around 200 subjects will take part, a certain number of whom suffer from Parkinson’s disease.

The samples obtained from these test subjects are to be analyzed at the molecular level and additionally by Joy Milne and a team of odor experts.

One hopes to find a kind of “olfactory fingerprint” that is responsible for the perceived changes in body odor. One could then investigate this later.

If the hypothesis is confirmed that an early diagnosis based on the molecular composition of body secretions is possible, a test procedure could soon be developed from this.

That would be a major advance in Parkinson’s research. It would not only enable affected persons to be identified at an early stage, but could also open up new treatment options.

If therapeutics were used in the early stages, Parkinson’s disease could perhaps be stopped or even cured.