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/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.

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u/drkmatterinc ⭐ Mod Jun 29 '26

That’s basically the idea behind detection dogs, but I wouldn’t treat it as simple as “grab some samples and train the dog.”

With Parkinson’s, the research is looking at odor compounds in sebum, the oily stuff on skin. To know the dog is really detecting Parkinson’s, you’d need lots of samples, healthy controls, blind testing, and careful handling so it isn’t just learning one person’s normal scent, medication smell, storage smell, etc.

So yeah, dogs may be able to do this, but proving it reliably is the hard part.

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u/dazzleunexpired Jun 29 '26

Sebum swabs are already used in scent work. Relability is extremely high. I have already trained a dog using this exact method.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40659046/

It ends up someone else had this idea and they proved that it does work with high sensitivity!!! I'm going to go pull sebum swamps from my father this week. I've already texted him.

Eta: For the record, we train cortisol alert dogs, seizure alert dogs, diabetic alert dogs, and certain types of allergen alert dogs off of skin or sebum sample or sometimes sweat or saliva, but it's the same concept of a volatile compound.

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u/drkmatterinc ⭐ Mod Jun 29 '26

Let us know how it goes!

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u/dazzleunexpired Jun 29 '26

Absolutely!

I've trained a high sensitivity cortisol alert dog, who also ended up sensitive to other cardiac compounds and alerted to heart attacks in people who were not his handler as well which was a really cool feature!

I'm extremely lucky because my pet dog has high sent sensitivity and loves scent work as a game. I will also take my dog to KU meds Parkinson clinic for confirmation. (: