A woman’s hyper-sensitive sense of smell has been used by scientists to develop a test to determine whether people have Parkinson’s disease. The test has taken years to be created after academics first discovered Joy Milne could smell it on people. The 72-year-old from Perth, Scotland, has a rare condition which gives her a heightened sense of smell.
…Dr Kunath paired up with Professor Perdita Barran to examine Mrs Milne’s sense of smell. The scientists believed that the scent may be caused by a chemical change in skin oil, known as sebum, that is triggered by the disease. In their preliminary work they asked Mrs Milne to smell t-shirts worn by people who have Parkinson’s and those who did not. Mrs Milne correctly identified the t-shirts worn by Parkinson’s patients but she also said that one from the group of people without Parkinson’s smelled like the disease—8 months later the individual who wore the t-shirt was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Researchers hoped the finding could lead to a test being developed to detect Parkinson’s, working under the assumption that if they were able to identify a unique chemical signature in the skin linked to Parkinson’s, they may eventually be able to diagnose the condition from simple skin swabs. In 2019 researchers at the University of Manchester, led by Prof Barran, announced that they had identified molecules linked to the disease found in skin swabs.
…Mrs Milne is now working with scientists around the world to see if she can smell other diseases like cancer and tuberculosis (TB).
“I have to go shopping very early or very late because of people’s perfumes, I can’t go into the chemical aisle in the supermarket”, she said. “So yes, a curse sometimes but I have also been out to Tanzania and have done research on TB and research on cancer in the US—just preliminary work. So it is a curse and a benefit.”
She said that she can sometimes smell people who have Parkinson’s while in the supermarket or walking down the street but has been told by medical ethicists she cannot tell them. “Which GP would accept a man or a woman walking in saying ‘the woman who smells Parkinson’s has told me I have it’? Maybe in the future but not now.”