Woman who can smell Parkinson’s disease helps scientists develop diagnostic test

January 14, 2018 - Benjamin Butterworth

Mrs Milne (BBC)

A woman who can smell Parkinson’s disease has helped scientists identify 10 molecules linked to the condition. Joy Milne, a retired nurse, has an extraordinary sense of smell that can identify Parkinson’s before a person has any symptoms. 

Mrs Milne discovered the ability when she noticed her husband’s smell change in the years before he visibly developed the disease. Now she is helping medical experts to develop a diagnostic test for the condition. Describing her ability, she told the BBC: “I’m in a tiny, tiny branch of the population somewhere between a dog and a human.” Discovery When Mrs Milne noticed her husband’s odor change, she put it down to bad hygiene on his part.

However everything changed when she attended a Parkinson’s meeting and noticed that all of the people with the condition had the same smell as her husband. “I smelled it 10 to 12 years before Les was diagnosed,” Milne said. “As the Parkinson’s got worse, the smell got worse. “It became just part of him, but I with my sensitive sense of smell, I could smell it all the time and it became quite uncomfortable really, but I had the sense not to nag too much.” According to Milne, Parkinson’s disease has a very thick, musky smell.

Proof When researchers conducted tests with Mrs Milne they found she was able to identify people living with Parkinson’s from people without the condition by smelling skin swabs taken from both groups. Doctors tested her abilities by asking her to smell 12 shirts – six worn by people with Parkinson’s, and six by volunteers without the disease. 

Mrs Milne correctly identified all of the shirts. Prof Perdita Barran, chair of Mass Spectrometry in the School of Chemistry at Manchester University told The Telegraph: “It is very humbling as a mere measurement scientist to have this ability to help find some signature molecules to diagnose Parkinson’s. It wouldn’t have happened without Joy. “For all the serendipity, it was Joy and Les who were absolutely convinced that what she could smell would be something that could be used in a clinical context and so now we are beginning to do that.” 

Diagnoses Scientists have identified the 10 molecules which appear in high concentration of the skin swabs from Parkinson’s patients thanks to Mrs Milne’s smell tests. They now intend to train up dogs to sniff out the smell. 

An estimated 127,000 people in Britain have Parkinson’s disease – roughly one in 500. Parkinson’s damages nerves in the brain causing a person to struggle with movement and speech. By the time physical symptoms develop half of the damage to nerves has already been done, limiting the effects that drugs can have.

“If we get the test right, then we’ll never get to that stage because at that stage of diagnosis 60 to 70 per cent of damage, neural damage, is already done,” she says. 

There is currently no cure for Parkinson’s.

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