Woman who can smell Parkinson's!

Derek W

Derek W

Derek W

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-47627179

Just seen this on the BBC and Scottish news. Woman in Scotland noticed a change in her husband's smell nearly 15yrs before being diagnosed. She's now helping with medical research to help identify Parkinsons sufferers.

She did an experiment smelling 12 t shirts .6 with Parkinsons 6 from a controlled group. She identified 7 so the doctors thought 11 out Of 12 wasn't bad. The 7th one was later diagnosed with Parkinson's so managed to identify it early on. Fascinating stuff.
 
I know nothing about the cure for Parkinson's but this would be pretty good to have in a GP checkup once reaching retirement or maybe earlier. Looks like they can recreate her ability using mass spectrometry and she apparently picked it up early on one of the control subjects who wasn't diagnosed at the time.
 
Can she smell the cheese?

In all seriousness this is a very interesting line of enquiry into biomarker discovery for disease. It just so happens that this lady is very sensitive to a particular molecule which Parkinson’s patients appear to produce or metabolise differently. Would be interesting to grind up the t shirts and run them through a mass spectrometer.
 
I can smell the common cold. Not only that, I can smell it over the internet. You'll all have it in the next 15 years, every single one of you.

You mark my words!
 
Diddums said:
Well spit it out then! She's an octopus who identifies as a human, isn't she?
Click to expand...

:p

It's in the article, she's just sensitive to the smell of a couple of chemicals that people with Parkinsons produce in greater quantities.

We've seen similar things with dogs that can smell cancer etc but that's more common since their sense of smell is thousands (millions?) of times more sensitive than humans
 
It's like those dogs who when trained can sense when their owner is about to have a seizure and warn them, mindblowing stuff.
 
Seeing as how Parkinsons affects the autonomic nervous system, I would guess that she is just smelling for sweat. The control group is far too small to come to any definite conclusion.
 
mmj_uk said:
It's like those dogs who when trained can sense when their owner is about to have a seizure and warn them, mindblowing stuff.
Click to expand...

Anyone brave enough to sniff my t-shirt on some days has a fairly high chance of suffering a seizure tbh. :eek:
 
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