Woman smelled husband’s Parkinson’s years before diagnosis

She is 65-year-old Joy Milne, and according to BBC News andThe New York Times, she sensed an unusual “musky” odor on her late husband Les years before he was first diagnosed by doctors.

The widow of a man diagnosed with Parkinson’s is working with researchers looking into the condition after she found that there was a “smell” she associated with the disease.

James Beck, vice president of the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, told ABC News it would be “revolutionary” if the smell study was proven to be accurate. What amazed scientists was that at the time she got them all right except for one shirt that she said it belonged to a Parkinson’s diagnosed patient.

Curious about Mrs. Milne’s claim that she can sniff Parkinson’s disease patients, scientists from The University of Manchester and the University of Edinburgh have decided to make a team and study if what the woman says is true.

“Tilo was interested and together we worked out ways to see if I could detect it from other people with Parkinson’s and not just Les”, Milne said in her statement. Joy says his odor was subtle and she occasionally got whiffs of a musky smell.

Joy Milne’s husband died of Parkinson’s disease in June. The one person who Joy identified incorrectly began showing signs of the disease and was diagnosed eight months later.

However, she never though much of her ability until she told scientists at the University of Edinburgh that she could do it, according to Metro. The pilot research included six folks with Parkinson’s illness and in addition six folks with out it.

She was actually 12 for 12. Her sense of smell is so strong that she was adamant that a member of the control group had the disease as well. “That really impressed us, and we had to dig further into this phenomenon”.

Parkinson’s is a progressive disease of the nervous system with no known cure. And because skin changes are common in those with Parkinson’s disease, the researchers suspect Milne is able to pick up on those changes through skin particles people shed. “Parkinson’s is incredibly hard to diagnose”.

Milne made the connection between the smell and the disease after picking up the same scent from other sufferers.

They want to identify the molecular signature responsible for this smell and then develop a diagnostic tool or test to identify patients by as simple a method as swabbing.