Smelling Parkinson's

In the news this week you might have seen a perplexing story about a lady who can smell Parkinson's! Her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's and she noticed a strange smell. She only connected the dots when she attended a Parkinson's UK support group and was suddenly surrounded by the smell.

This is not the first report of people being able to smell diseases. Patients with Type 1 diabetes whose sugars have gone very high and blood acidic start to smell like pear drops. There are many reports of nurses who can smell specific types of bacteria.

This phenomena is not limited to humans either! One of my colleagues at medical school presented on the fascinating topic of animals that can smell diseases which included rats which can smell tuberculosis and dogs which can smell cancer. (Also a non-smell related one but equally interesting is that pidgeons can be trained to identify breast cancer on mammograms and pathology slides)

Joy Milne was given 12 t shirts to smell, 6 had been worn by Parkinson's patients and 6 were from people without Parkinson's. She correctly identified the 6 people with Parkinson's and also thought that one of the healthy controls had the smell as well, this person was subsequently diagnosed with Parkinson's so she had 100% accuracy at smelling Parkinson's.

From a scientific point of view, there must be a particular chemical that she is smelling and she has been working with a team in Manchester to try to identify the chemical that she is smelling. Fortunately they have found two chemicals that could be the source of this smell. This is a really important finding because it can lead to a potential quick test to diagnose Parkinson's. This test could even be used to diagnose Parkinson's earlier.

Discovery of volatile biomarkers of Parkinson’s disease from sebum

Drupad K Trivedi, Eleanor Sinclair, Yun Xu, Depanjan Sarkar, Camilla Liscio, Phine Banks, Joy Milne, Monty Silverdale, Tilo Kunath, Royston Goodacre, Perdita Barran

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease that presents with significant motor symptoms, for which there is no diagnostic test. We have serendipitously identified a hyperosmic individual, a ‘Super Smeller’ that can detect PD by odor alone, and our early pilot studies have indicated that the odor was present in the sebum from the skin of PD subjects. Here, we have employed an unbiased approach to investigate the volatile metabolites of sebum samples obtained noninvasively from the upper back of 64 participants in total (21 controls and 43 PD subjects). Our results, validated by an independent cohort, identified a distinct volatiles-associated signature of PD, including altered levels of perillic aldehyde and eicosane, the smell of which was then described as being highly similar to the scent of PD by our ‘Super Smeller’