A woman who says she can smell Parkinson's disease before a person even has symptoms has inspired new research that could create a new way to diagnose and treat the illness.
Joy Milne, a 65-year-old from Scotland, lived with her husband who suffered from Parkinson's for more than 20 years before he
died earlier this year, according to Sky News. A former nurse, Milne said she noticed her husband's smell change six years before he was diagnosed with the disease.
Since they were not in contact with others suffering from Parkinson's, she never noticed that the smell could be linked to the disease.
"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,'" Milne told Sky News. "I realized that then other people smelt."
"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," she continued.
Milne's curiosity about the Parkinson's smell led her to Dr. Tilo Kunath, a Parkinson's fellow at Edinburgh University, who tested her to
see how accurate she was, BBC News reported.
"The first time we tested Joy we recruited six people with Parkinson's and six without," Kunath, who works in the university's School of Biological Sciences, told BBC News. "We had them wear a T-shirt for a day then retrieved the T-shirts, bagged them and coded them."
"Her job was to tell us who had Parkinson's and who didn't. Her accuracy was 11 out of 12. We were quite impressed. She got the six Parkinson's but then she was adamant one of the 'control' subjects had Parkinson's."
Miraculously, the person Milne got wrong was diagnosed with Parkinson's eight months later.
"So Joy wasn't correct for 11 out of 12, she was actually 12 out of 12 correct at that time," Kunath said.
BBC News wrote that scientists in Edinburgh are working on finding a molecular signature responsible for the odor in Parkinson's patients and will then work to develop a test that can accurately diagnose it.
Katherine Crawford, the Scotland director of Parkinson's U.K., told the BBC that the disease is difficult to diagnose and a newer, simpler test could be life-changing for patients.
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