This woman can actually feel Parkinson's disease before she is diagnosed

At present, there is no definitive diagnostic test for Parkinson's disease. Soon, this could change thanks to a woman named Joy Milne – she can detect someone's brain disease before the symptoms appear.

It sounds too bizarre to be true, but Joy noticed the "musky" smell on her husband 10 years before doctors diagnosed him with Parkinson's. When she went to a meeting with other people with the disease, she realized that the smell and the disease were related.

Since then, scientists have been working with Joy to try to determine exactly what she felt. It seems to be related to sebum – the oily secretion that helps keep our skin and hair naturally hydrated and can be more produced in people with Parkinson's disease.

While it was already known that Parkinson's disease caused an increase in sebum production, researchers wanted to know exactly which biomarkers released the fragrance that Joy captured, so they used a chemical badysis by mbad spectrometry to extract individual compounds.

"We have designed experiments to mimic what Joy does, using a mbad spectrometer to do what Joy can do when she feels these things about people with Parkinson's disease," said one of the members of the team. team, Perdita Barran of the University of Manchester in the UK. the BBC.

Samples were taken from 64 volunteers, some with Parkinson's disease and others not, in order to present them to the "super-scented" Joy Milne for badysis. People with the disease have been found to have more hippuric acid, eicosane, octadecbad and other biomarkers in their sebum.

The presence of these molecular compounds is linked to varying levels of neurotransmitters in people with Parkinson's disease – these chemical messengers that help neurons connect and control our thoughts and movements.

"This could have a considerable impact not only on an early and definitive diagnosis, but also on helping patients to monitor the effect of treatment," Barran said.

Although 64 people are a relatively small sample, and it is not yet known how much an odor of sebum can detect Parkinson's disease at an early stage, there is a lot of potential here: if a swab test can be developed it will be easy to take and badyze.

And even if there is still no cure for Parkinson's, the sooner we get better, the better we can find out how to prevent it before we find a way to cure it at its ultimate stage.

Most of us do not notice any change in the sense of smell in people with Parkinson's – scientists believe that a particularly acute sense of smell, like Joy's, is needed to detect this. different smell.

In fact, Joy says that she can smell the odors of other diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer – so she's not done yet to help the progress of Science. Then she will work with the same team on a diagnostic test to possibly detect tuberculosis.

More than 10 million people in the world are living with Parkinson's disease, a number that is expected to increase sharply in the future as the population ages. Thanks to Joy and the work of the researchers behind this new study, we could perhaps do something about it.

"What we could hope for is that if we can diagnose people earlier, before motor symptoms are manifested, there are treatments that can prevent the spread of the disease," he said. Barran at the BBC. "So it's really the ultimate ambition."

The search was published in ACS Central Science.