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A nurse who felt her husband's Parkinson's disease (PD) even before he was diagnosed helped British researchers identify four biomarkers of the disease (ACS Cent. Sci. 2019, DOI: 10.1021 / acscentsci.8b00879). These compounds, isolated from cutaneous secretions, could help researchers develop a new diagnostic tool for PD before motor symptoms develop.
Joy Milne is a supersmeller, a person with an extremely sensitive sense of smell. After her husband, Les, was diagnosed with PD in 1986, he realized that his "musky" smell was the one he shared with other people with PD. In collaboration with Milne, Perdita Barran's team at the University of Manchester used gas chromatography mbad spectrometry to isolate four chemicals present in different amounts in the skin sebum of patients with PD, by compared to people without PD. Milne has confirmed that a mixture of these chemicals in specific proportions has a smell of PD.
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