68-year-old Scottish resident Joy Milne surprised doctors with her ability to detect Parkinson's disease through her sense of smell. And it helped doctors understand what exactly causes this smell and offer a very simple way to diagnose this complex disease.
Parkinson's disease is a chronic neurological degenerative disease that affects the elderly. It is associated with the destruction of cells in the nervous system and is still incurable.
Joy Milne's husband, from Perth, Perthshire, was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease when he was 45 years old. But some time before that, Joy noticed that her husband's smell had changed and now it was not a very pleasant musky smell. True, then she did not attach any importance to this.
But when Joy went to the Parkinson's support group meeting, she was surprised to find that other people with the disease emanate the same odor.
In June 2015, Joy's husband passed away at the age of 65, and shortly thereafter, Joy, a nurse, accidentally mentioned an unusual smell associated with Parkinson's patients in conversation with other doctors. They were intrigued by her ability to smell this smell and soon Joy was invited to the University of Edinburgh for a unique experiment.
According to Dr. Tylo Kunath:
According to Dr. Kunat, all specialists were shocked by this testing and said that it is necessary to further study this phenomenon. And they finally found out that in Parkinson's patients, indeed, changes in the skin at the molecular level also occur and the patient begins to emit a special smell that ordinary people do not feel.
Because of the appearance of this odor, the Parkinson's disease test is now a very simple test - a cotton swab is pressed to a person's forehead and then checked for those “odor marks” that are characteristic of Parkinson's patients.
Parkinson's disease is usually very difficult to diagnose because early symptoms are common in other neurological diseases.
Joy has worked with doctors and scientists for three years and recently published an article in the medical journal ACS Central Science about her and a new, very simple method for diagnosing Parkinson's disease.
The components responsible for the unusual odor are mainly hippuric acid, eicosane and octadecanol. They are also present on the skin of healthy people, but not in such high concentrations as in Parkinson's patients.
These substances are found in sebum, an oily secretion that moisturizes everyone's skin. But Parkinson's patients have more of this secretion and therefore they also often have seborrheic dermatitis.