An excerpt from National Geographic -
You Can Smell When Someone's Sick—Here's How
The curious case of a woman who can smell Parkinson’s reminds us our noses are our first defense against illness.
By Erika Engelhaupt
Recently, the case of the woman who can smell Parkinson’s brought attention to the idea of sniffing for disease. Parkinson’s is notoriously tricky to diagnose; by the time most people learn they have it, they’ve already lost half of the dopamine-producing brain cells the disease attacks. But about six years before her husband Les was diagnosed, Joy Milne noticed that he smelled odd.
Les had a “sort of woody, musky odor,” Milne told the Telegraph. Years later, in a room full of Parkinson’s patients, she realized the smell wasn’t unique to Les. All the people with Parkinson’s smelled that way.
She mentioned it to a Parkinson’s researcher in Edinburgh named Tilo Kunath, who mentioned it to his colleague, analytical chemist Perdita Barran. They decided the well-meaning Mrs. Milne may have just noticed the characteristic smell of old people; “We talked ourselves out of it,” Barran says.
That could have been the end of it. But another biochemist encouraged the pair to track Milne down and try a blind T-shirt test: She sniffed six sweaty tees from people diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and six from healthy controls. Milne correctly identified which six had Parkinson’s, but she also tagged one of the control subjects as having the disease.
Despite that error, Barran was intrigued—all the more so eight months later, when the same supposedly healthy control subject Milne had identified was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/smell-sickness-parkinsons-disease-health-science/
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