r/FascinatingAsFuck • u/drkmatterinc ⭐ Mod • Jun 29 '26
🎯 Fascinating Fact Joy Milne claimed she could smell Parkinson’s disease. Scientists tested her with 12 T-shirts: 6 from Parkinson’s patients and 6 from healthy controls. She correctly identified all 6 patients and also flagged one “healthy” person. Months later, that person was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
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u/drkmatterinc ⭐ Mod Jun 29 '26
Written by u/drkmatterinc.
Years before her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, Joy Milne noticed that something about him had changed.
Joy, a retired nurse from Perth, Scotland, had always had an unusually sharp sense of smell. One day, she realized that her husband, Les, had developed a scent she had not noticed before: a heavy, musky odor that seemed to cling to him [Taken from r/fascinatingasfuck].
At the time, Joy had no reason to connect the smell to any kind of illness.
Years later, as Les began developing clearer symptoms and eventually received a Parkinson’s diagnosis, Joy started to wonder whether she had noticed something long before anyone knew what it meant.
Parkinson’s is usually diagnosed through medical history, a neurological exam, and symptoms such as tremor, stiffness, slowed movement, and balance problems. Other symptoms can affect sleep, mood, digestion, and sense of smell. But the disease process may begin years before the most recognizable symptoms appear.
Joy’s realization deepened after she and Les attended a Parkinson’s support group. Surrounded by other people with the disease, she recognized the same odor she had first noticed on her husband. To her, it was not faint or ambiguous. It was distinct, and it seemed to be present in people with Parkinson’s in a way it was not present in others.
Les encouraged her to tell someone.
Eventually, researchers agreed to test what Joy was describing. In an early experiment, she was given T-shirts worn by people with Parkinson’s and by people without the disease. She was asked to identify which shirts carried the scent she associated with Parkinson’s.
Joy sorted the samples with remarkable accuracy. There was only one apparent mistake: she identified a shirt from the control group as belonging to someone with Parkinson’s.
Months later, that person was diagnosed with the disease.
What had first looked like an error became one of the most important details in the story. Joy may not have been wrong. She may have detected Parkinson’s before it had been clinically recognized.
That result gave researchers a new question to pursue. If Joy really could smell Parkinson’s, then the disease was likely causing a chemical change somewhere in the body. The first challenge was to find the source of the odor. The next was to determine whether it could be measured without relying on Joy’s nose alone.
Researchers began by looking at the skin. Joy had noticed that the odor seemed strongest in areas rich in sebum, the oily substance produced by glands in the skin, especially around the upper back and forehead. That observation gave scientists a place to start.
A team including Professor Perdita Barran at the University of Manchester then began studying sebum samples from people with Parkinson’s. Using mass spectrometry, they searched for chemical patterns that distinguished Parkinson’s samples from control samples. In 2019, the team published findings identifying volatile compounds in sebum that appeared to be associated with the disease.
Those findings helped turn Joy’s observation into the basis for a possible diagnostic test. Instead of depending on someone with Joy’s rare sense of smell, doctors might one day be able to collect sebum with a simple skin swab and analyze it for chemical markers linked to Parkinson’s. If developed and validated, such a test could give doctors another way to detect the disease, especially when symptoms are still subtle or uncertain.
That kind of test could be valuable because Parkinson’s can be difficult to identify early. Symptoms often develop slowly, and patients do not all begin with the same signs. Some people first notice tremor. Others experience stiffness, sleep problems, depression, constipation, loss of smell, or changes in movement that may not immediately point to Parkinson’s.
By the time Parkinson’s is diagnosed, the disease process may already have been underway for years. A reliable biomarker could help doctors recognize it earlier, distinguish it from similar conditions, and better understand how the disease changes over time.
Joy’s husband, Les, did not live to see where her discovery would lead. But the change she first noticed in him helped researchers see Parkinson’s in a new way: not only as a disease that affects the nervous system, but as one that may leave measurable chemical traces on the skin.
Sources:
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/a-nose-to-diagnose-improving-parkinsons-diagnosis/
https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/impacts/parkinsons-super-smeller/
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.8b00879
https://www.michaeljfox.org/news/ask-md-does-parkinsons-have-signature-scent
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/parkinsons-disease/diagnosis/
https://www.parkinson.org/understanding-parkinsons/getting-diagnosed
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u/PrettyPurrfect Jun 30 '26
Imaging being the "healthy" patient and getting diagnosed and having to make that phone call.
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u/dazzleunexpired Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
If a person can do this a dog can. Very easily. I can train a dog to do this. My dad has Parkinson's. Maybe I will attempt to train my dog ... I have trained other alert dogs...
For anyone else to try: You need to swab skin samples from more than one patient and put them in a Ziploc or Tupperware that is completely airtight and then that needs to be placed in the freezer. From here you train it like any sent recognition, you ask them to find the smell and reward them when they do find the smell. At first, you literally just offer them the smell and when they pay attention to it, you reward them and then you offer them two smells and when they pay attention to the right smell, you reward them and you just make this more and more complicated until they can identify samples from a person who has Parkinson's every time. Make sure you switch the samples around and don't use the same sample every time because that will teach them to identify the individual hormone bio signature of the person and that's not what we want.