Woman who has rare ability to smell Parkinson's disease describes the scent she noticed on her husband
A woman who has an extremely rare ability to smell Parkinson's disease revealed what she smelt on her husband before his diagnosis.
Joy Milne is a bit of a medical marvel. The Scotswoman had been has been with her husband, Les, since she was 16 years old and, with the length of time they'd been together in mind, it's safe to say she became accustomed to his smell.
But Joy all of a sudden began noticing a change in her spouse's odor.
Science has already worked out why a person's smell changes as they age, which all comes down to substance 2-nonenal that's found in the human body increasing as we get older.
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But Les' changing smell wasn't just age related, but health related as well.
Like how some dogs can be trained to smell certain cancers or when their owner might be about to have a seizure, Joy is able to smell Parkinson's disease on people.
It was around Les' 32nd birthday that Joy spotted a change in her husband's smell.
Recalling the time, she told The Guardian: "In 1982, before Les’s 32nd birthday, I noticed a musky, dank odour on him – he knew about my heightened sense of smell. I thought it might be the unprocessed air of the operating theatres he worked in and told him to shower more. That caused arguments."
12 years later, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease — the same condition that actor Michael J. Fox has.
The pair went on to make the connection between Joy's sense of smell and his diagnosis, but it wasn't until later that they discovered that she was able to detect the disease in other people too.
Les and Joy had attended a Parkinson's support group when she was hit with an overwhelmingly familiar smell.
After come to learn about the scale of her unique skill was, Joy has gone on to do all she can to help scientists work out a way to use her sense of smell as a means of early Parkinson's disease detection.
"Les and I should have been enjoying retirement, but Parkinson’s had stolen our lives," said Joy.
"We became determined that others wouldn’t suffer the same way. When Les died in June 2015, he made me promise I’d carry on. I spent time in labs, smelling sufferers’ T-shirts and swabs for sebum – the skin oil we all produce, which changes with the onset of Parkinson’s.
"I could detect whether the person had the disease with 95% accuracy. I was surprised."
Joy has spent the last few years working with the University of Manchester, UK, on research, and has even been named in a paper published in the journal ACS Central Science.
Such research she's helped with has revealed that a number of compounds, particularly hippuric acid, eicosane, and octadecanal, were found in higher than usual concentrations on the skin of Parkinson's patients, BBC News reported.
Niamh Shackleton