Can dogs be trained to smell Parkinson’s?

April 23, 2016

"Olive" and her owner Angela Degavre are part of a local experiment to determine if dogs can be taught to smell Parkinson's disease

Twenty-one-month-old Olive is learning to identify the scent of Parkinson's disease. She is the perfect student: she's young, smart, eager to learn, and has more than 300 million olfactory receptors in her nose. Olive is volunteer Angela Degavre's German Shepherd puppy. Together they are participating in a grassroots experiment being conducted in Friday Harbor to find out if dogs can "odor-identify" people with Parkinson's.

Local dog trainer Lisa Holt designed the experiment after a former student, Nancy Jones, whose husband suffers from Parkinson's, sent her an email about a woman in Scotland, Joy Milne, who can smell Parkinson's disease. Holt, a certified trainer by the National Association of Canine Scent Work, figured that if a person is able to identify people with the disease by scent, then surely a dog, whose sense of smell is 10,000 to 100,000 times as acute as humans, can be taught to sniff it out as well.

"We are the first to try this with Parkinson's," said Holt. "We don't know the answer yet. We don't even know if there is an answer. But it's a great opportunity to try."

Holt and Jones then met with the director of the Washington State Chapter of the American Parkinson's Disease Association, who pledged her support of the project. Holt then began recruiting former students and their dogs, including Olive and Degavre, to devote an hour four times per week for 13 weeks to participate in the study held in the old fair office of the San Juan County Fairgrounds.

Using the same training and testing protocols used for training dogs to odor-identify narcotics, cancer and even bombs, and mimicking the research techniques that scientists in the U.K. used to study Milne, Holt and Jones decided to use T-shirts, tagged and stored in steel thermoses to seal in the scent, from those with and without Parkinson's. Along with input from local analytical chemist Jack Bell, the thermoses are then laid out in random order for the dogs to smell. At first, the shirt from someone with the disease has a small piece of turkey next to it. This way the dogs are taught to associate the particular smell of that shirt with their "primary reinforcer": the bite of turkey. After hundreds of exposures to the shirts, the turkey will be removed with the hope that the dogs will have learned to, and still be able to indicate, the shirt from the Parkinson's patient.

"If we see that the dogs can indicate then we can talk about a second stage of training," said Holt. "First we have to find out if there's anything to train on."

Currently there are no standard diagnostic tests for Parkinson's, and making an accurate diagnosis – especially in the early stages – can be particularly difficult, according to the Parkinson's Disease Foundation. Since Milne was able to detect the change in her husband's odor six years before he was diagnosed with the disease, it's not unreasonable to assume that dogs could be invaluable in helping with early detection.

"If somehow a dog can make a diagnosis early," said Jones."It would save people a lot of agony."

To help with the project call Nancy Jones at 378-8997 or Lisa Holt at San Juan Island Dog Training.

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